Boot Magazine: Issue 20 - PC Notebook Autopsy (Apr 1998)

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PCI Soundcards Reviewed and Rated

440BX’s 100MHz bus:
First bootMark numbers

PURE 1C POWER

nVidia fires back in a
combative Interview

A fast forward look at
Intel’s 64-bit CPU

www.bootnet.com

Hands-on preview

of Palm III PDA

▼

■

MED

I A ON"

AGENDA HOME

Intel Pentium® II Processor

64MB SDRAM DIMM

6.4GB Ultra IDE Hard Drive

4MB AGP Graphics Card

Wavetable Sound/200 Watt Amplified Speakers

32X CD-ROM Drive

56K Fax Modem

104 Keyboard/PS2 Mouse

1.44MB Floppy Drive

ATX Mini-Tower Case w/235 Watt Power Supply
Microsoft Windows 95
19” .26dpi Color Monitor

II I'Loc'C^.^or Willt $ 1 . 90 ^
1 1 cm im m ® L L l - ro o cm i m V LAI. ■!>_. $20 to
Lmnlmru® IE l’i ocm cm cm 00 0 Ml !>. $2180

EXPERT PRO

Intel Pentium® II Processor
128MB SDRAM DIMM

4.5 Ultra Wide SCSI HD w/2940 Ultra Wide Controller

4MB AGP Graphics Card

Wavetable Sound/200 Watt Amplified Speakers

32X CD-ROM Drive

56K Fax Modem w/Voice

104 Keyboard/PS2 Mouse

1.44MB Floppy Drive

Iomega ZIP Drive

ATX Mini-Tower Case w/235 Watt Power Supply
Microsoft Windows 95
17” .26dpi Color Monitor

LL SBC] bil^L $2S@§

l:-e-Lii,LU:LU.® LL 388 IMilMp $2820

www.mediaon.com

Note, Intel Inside Logo and Pentium are registered trademarks and MMX is a trademark of Intel Corporation. All other names are properties
of their respective corporations. Price and specifications are subject to change without notice. Not responsible for typographic error.

pentium®][

AGENDA BUSINESS

Intel Pentium® II Processor

64MB SDRAM DIMM

8.5GB Ultra IDE Hard Drive

4MB AGP Graphics Card

16 Bit Sound Card/80 Watt Amplified Speakers

32X CD-ROM Drive

56K Fax Modem

104 Keyboard/PS2 Mouse

1.44MB Floppy Drive

Iomega ZIP Drive

ATX Mini-Tower Case w/235 Watt Power Supply
Microsoft Windows 95
15” .28dpi Color Monitor

EXPERT II

Intel Pentium® II Processor

64MB SDRAM DIMM

4.3GB Ultra IDE Hard Drive

4MB AGP Graphics Card

Wavetable Sound/200 Watt Amplified Speakers

32X CD-ROM Drive

56K Fax Modem

104 Keyboard/PS2 Mouse

1.44MB Floppy Drive

ATX Mini-Tower Case w/235 Watt Power Supply
Microsoft Windows 95
17” .26dpi Color Monitor

• 2-year limited warranty / 2-year labor TEL

47257 Fremont Blvd. Fremont, CA 94538 FAX

Product Information Number 236

Skidmarking
your PC

Everyone brags about benchmarks, but
nobody does anything about them. Well,
all that’s about to end.

The boot editors have started the latest
craze in personal computing: racing for
pink slips. You think your system’s
tough? Put up or shut up! That’s right,
we’ve been going to local computer swap
meets and bringing our homemade
muscle with us on a dolly. We roll up alongside some greaser
flexing his MHz for the ladies, and just one look makes it clear:

We mean business.

Both parties hand their pink slip, to the fox in the capri
pants (actually it’s usually just pink post-it notes that say, “IOU
my PC”), she takes the scarf from around her neck (also a
requirement), raises it high above her head, and both parties
load the bootMarks.

The scarf drops and it’s time to rev on the redline.

Beads of sweat trickle down the forehead of our victim as we
both run Norton’s bootMark.
Their knuckles go white as we
blaze through the Quake demo.
An uncontrollable twitch begins
as Visual C++ compiles.

Then comes SYS mark. This
burly test of a system’s studliness
runs the actual kernel of a slew of
real-world apps — such as
PageMaker, Word, Excel,
CorelDraw, and PowerPoint — and
can bring the most capable
machine to its virtual knees.

This takes a couple of hours,
so at this point we like to go to
lunch with our nemesis. Usually grilled cheese sandwiches.

But when we get back, it’s all business. Scores are tallied,
people from our art department whip up charts in QuarkXpress
(running on Kick-Ass notebook PCs), and dye-sub color prints
are generated.

Everyone then gathers around and studies the numbers.
There’s some debate... “Sure his VidTach may beat mine, but I
have video IN and OUT!” And, “Screw visual quality, my D3D
score is higher and the bottom-line number is all that counts!”
But after all is said and run, one of us stands victorious.

And one of us doesn’t have a PC anymore.

Sure this is tough. Sure it’s cruel. But you’ve gotta be cruel to
be kind in this two-PCs-enter-one-PC-leaves world. And boot’s
gonna be the last man standing.

We roll up

alongside some
greaser flexing
his MHz for the
ladies, and just
one look makes
it clear: We
mean business.

Brad Dosland
Editor in Chief

14 bootwire News that matters.

Back when boot was just a HI’ grommet, a small company called
Nimantics was beating all the big companies to the punch with
notebooks running ahead of the pack ...by packing desktop CPUs
instead of mobile versions. Now the revolutionary company has
disappeared into the night, and its customers, along with the local
and federal authorities, are searching for its owners. ALSO: Bonded
modems deliver the speed that esoteric technologies promise.

yo/CES

21 The Saint Alex St. John cooks up some mischief
from the pages of the Microsoft Anarchists 1 Cookbook.

23 Game Theory T. Liam McDonald has a lucid vision
that the laws of evolution are finally catching up with the inbred
PC game industry.

25 On the Line Shel Kimen is the voice from deep left
field that is crying out in defense of Java.

27 Fast Forward Tom Half hill’s surprised at how little
hype Intel’s 64-bit CISC/RISC processor is getting. Merced cometh!

96 Glitch Jon Phillips is in the field this month, reporting
on the bloody standoff going down in the hills of Redmond, WA.

DEPARTMENTS

5 Comm Port Readers buzz via e-mail, fax, and post-
partum syndrome.

12 bOOtDiSC Your guide to the joys of our shiny silver
platter. A sampling of this month’s treasures includes: WOMB of
PDA software! PLUS QuarkXPress 4.0, Bryce 3D, CorelDraw 8,
MediaStudio Pro 5.0, Ultim@te Race Pro, Agile HTML Editor, and
much, much more.

18 Pure Lust Tech toys for digital girls and boys.

52 White Paper/1 2-Step Clinic This month, the

mysteries of core-logic chipsets are delved. This little-known
component is to the PC what the immortal soul is to humans.
ALSO a slew of tips and techniques to soothe your burning
sensations in this month’s All-Andrew episode of Clinic.

56 bootworthy No man is an island and no PC should
be without a powerboat of a modem to get around in. If you’re not
surfing at 56K, you’re sinking in the mire. Check out this month’s
roundup of the best modems in the wet wired world.

2 boot APR 98

Notebook Autopsy

Notebook PCs show no signs of
aggressive behavior— yet. So
before these intelligent
alien life forms crash
down on your Roswellian
landing pad and get the
better of you, read our
startling autopsy results to see
what makes them tick. Don’t make your next
notebook purchase until you do.

PDAs (Public
Displays of Affection)

If you simply must fondle your PDA in public, make sure
you’re playing with this year’s hottest model. We give you
the gift of love: 1998’s sexiest Personal Digital Assistants.
We’ve got the first Windows CE 2.0 palmtop and a hands-on
world exclusive preview of the Palm III.

Lip: nVidia’s David Kirk

His business card says he’s the Minister of
Armaments, and he has one of the deadliest 3D weapont
around: the Riva 128. But is it strong enough to take on
the Intel i740 stormtroopers? Kirk says it is, and he’s
more than ready to kick the crap out of i740, Voodoo
PowerVR, and anything else that his 3D competitors may
have brewing in their war rooms.

We’ve got two, count ’em, two hands-on
exclusives this month. First, check out our test drive of DirectX 6,
straight from Microsoft’s developer Meltdown in Redmond. Then
gorge yourself on the first BX-endowed motherboard running at a
bus speed of 100MHz and delivering some 400MHz P-ll lovin’.
We’ve got the pix and numbers!

You wanted the truth about PCI-based
soundcards and boot delivers. We ran a quartet of the latest in
sound technology through the gauntlet and warn you: Don’t
abandon the ISA bus till you read this!

- Intel’s i740 powers Real3D’s StarFighter accelerator to new
heights of visual quality.

- Deep in the heart of Polywell’s latest beats an AMD K6 266MHz.

- Get creative with reviews of Bryce 3D, QuarkXPress 4.0, Corel
Draw 8, and a pair of editors to create killer online content.

Microsoft

“This is the kind of game that can
wreck a marriage.... Best Overall
Game of 1997.” — Gamezilla 1.3.98

“If you love the smell of burning
arrows in the morning... Age of
Empires is just what the general
ordered."— Newsweek 11.10.97

“Utterly brilliant.” — PC Zone 9.97

“This game is great. I can heartily
recommend it to both turn-based
and real-time strategy gamers..."

— Computer Gaming World*1.98

— CNET Gamecenter 10.28.97
“Its a game of nailbiting intensity and

nonstop strategy.”— OGR.COM 12.97

“One of the best of the year in any
genre.” — The Atlanta Journal
Constitution 11.9.97

...a masterpiece.”

Computer Games Strategy Plus 11.97

ENSEMBLE

STUDIOS

“One of the years best games comes
from Microsoft.” —Jeff Green,
San Francisco Chronicle 11.1.97

“.^nothing is more frightening than
a row of seven War. Elephants...
—CNET Gamecenter 10.28.97

The new king of real-time strategy
games.” —PC Gaming.com 11.97

www.microsoft.com>

|ames>

Gimc developed bv Ensemble Studios Corp. for Microsoft Corporation.
© 1998 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft and Age of
Empires arc registered trademarks or trademarksof Microsoft Corporation
in the United States and/ or other countries. Other products and company
names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

a p r i I 19 9 8

EDITORIAL

editor in chief Brad Dosland

executive editor Jon Phillips

managing editor Sarah Pirch

news editor Bryan Del Rizzo

senior editor Andrew Sanchez

technical editor Sean Cleveland

webchemist Daevid Vincent

contributing editors Tom Halfhill, Shel Kimen.T. Liam

McDonald, Alex St. John

contributing writers Dave Hakala, Frank Lenk, Tara
Calishain, Tommy Maple, Rick Popko, Bob Senoff, Dan Simpson,
Paula Reaume, Tim Tully

ART

art director Kevin Ashburn
associate art director Sherry Monarko
designer Gerry “Danke Schoen” Serrano
contributing photographers Leigh Beisch, Aaron Lauer,
Mark Madeo

PRODUCTION

production director Richard Lesovoy
production coordinator Glenn Sadin

ADVERTISING

regional advertising manager Chris Coelho
marketplace account manager Tiffany Suen
marketing manager Erik “Everyone Keep Calm” Piller
advertising coordinator Jennifer Barbeau

CIRCULATION

newsstand director Bruce Eldridge
newsstand manager Thea Selby
circulation analyst Terry Lawson
circulation manager Tina Rodich
fulfillment manager Peggy Mores
direct mail manager Amy Nibbi

boot

150 North Hill Drive, Brisbane, CA 94005
url www.bootnet.com
subscriptions phone 800.274.3421
subscriptions back issues/sales 800.865.7240
subscription e-mail subscribe@bootnet.com
advertising 415.468.4684 ext. 110
editorial 415.468.4684; editor@bootnet.com
fax 415.468.4686

IMAGINE PUBLISHING INC

publisher Caroline Simpson-Bint

director of CD-ROM development Thomas Hale

new media business development manager Mary Hoppin

creative director Laura Morris

vice president of circulation Holly Klingel

vice president/CFO Tom Valentino

president Chris Anderson

INTERNATIONAL LICENSING REPRESENTATIVE

Robert J. Abramson and Associates, Inc.

720 Post Road, Scarsdale, NY 10583

volume 3, issue 4

boot (ISSN 1088-5439) is published monthly by Imagine Publishing Inc.,
150 North Hill Drive, Suite 40, Brisbane, CA 94005, USA. Periodical class
postage paid in Brisbane, CA, and at additional mailing offices. Newsstand
distribution is handled by Curtis Circulation Company. Basic subscription
rates: one year (12 issues) U.S. $30. OO/Canada $43.95 Canadian price
includes postage and GST (GST U 128220688 ). POSTMASTER Send changes
of address to boot, P.O.Box 51479, Boulder, CO 80328-1479.

Standard Mail enclosed in the following editions: A, A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, C, D,
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Imagine Publishing also publishes PC Gamer, Next Generation, Mac Addict,
Ultra Game Players, PlayStation Magazine, and The Net. Entire contents copy-
right 1998, Imagine Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole
or in part is prohibited. Imagine Publishing, Inc. is not affiliated with the com-
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PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Bulk Rate, U.S. Postage Paid,
Waseca, MN. Permit No. 350

r e Always Thought Of
lurselveSjAs The By

Ourselves As The Byte Of
Hot Rod Mags

boot has turned into just the computer
industry version of Hot Rod magazine.

If you are going to continue to aim your
magazine at those who like to play die latest
3D games, spending whatever money they
make on the hardware you rate as “Kick Ass,’
please discontinue my subscription!

Jennifer Zapp

Thanks for the best magazine for
computer fanatics. It's like Hot
Rod magazine for computers. I
enjoy trying to get the best per-
formance out of my machine,
though I’m sure I've wasted
more time tuning than I have
enjoying the performance.

Mdouville

boot is destined to become like
Easy Rider was in the beginning —
a no-holds-barred, Kick Ass
magazine. Sure, some people
won’t (and can’t) get it. Each of
these cultures is dedicated to the
advancement of its machines.

PCs are designed to shred apps
like there is no tomorrow!
Choppers are designed to shred
roads until there is no tomorrow!

Scott Tarr

Hey! There’s A Shel
In My Spam!

I found Shel Kimen’s spam
column in boot 18 timely and
informative. I always thought
replying to spam lists that offer
the ability to remove yourself from
that list would be a fruitless effort,
so I didn’t bother. Recendy, I also
heard that sending a Remove
reply is even worse — spammers
sometimes use the replies to
determine whether e-mail address-
es are valid! Sending a Remove
can actually be the opposite.

Jeff Magill

Homemade Liquid
Cooling

My AMD K6 166 was starting to
suck, and I’m still waiting for the
K6+3D. I figured I’d overclock.

But there just wasn’t much
improvement going to 200. 1
decided to go for the gusto and
look around for a liquid cooling
system. Here, in Albuquerque,

New Mexico, everybody looked at
me funny when I asked about a
liquid cooler. When I found one, it was $400,
so I decided to make my own, which cost $20.
It’s made of the heater core of a 1974 Datsun
280Z, two hydraulic brake lines, the filter
pump from a fish tank, the scary monster

n M 1

heatsink from my original computer, two
Mountain Dew cans, a package of heatsink
grease from Radio Shack, a package of fuel
tank patching epoxy (the most expensive),
some anti-freeze, and the power supply from
my ancient 386. 1 have successfully over-
docked to 233MHz, and am happily humming
along without any problems.

Now I want to do a 12-Step for the mag.

Geoff Danielson

Free 0SR2 Upgrade
From Microsoft

"It’s made of the
heater core of a
1974 Datsun
280Z, two

hydraulic brake
lines, the filter
pump from a
fish tank, the
scary monster
heatsink from
my original
computer, two
Mountain
Dew cans, a
package of
heatsink grease
from Radio
Shack, a
package of fuel
tank patching
epoxy, some
anti-freeze, and
the power
supply from my
ancient 386 "

For those of you out there stuck
with Win95’s ORS1 and FAT16,
there is a way out of the
darkness and it’s free. I recently
went to the Microsoft web site to
upgrade my IE 4.0 to the latest
revision. After upgrading, I pro-
ceeded to install and Fdisk a new
hard drive, and was surprised to
find that my OSR1 version of
Windows now had FAT32
support! After checking the
device manager, it indicated my
Windows version had been
upgraded to 950B (or OSR2).

Dave Wayne

Matroxic

I’d like to see Matrox improve its
failing customer support struc-
ture — poor phone access, unan-
swered e-mails to customer
support. While its web site is nice,
it doesn’t offer all the answers.
Matrox is shadowing itself in
product awards and not rewarding
those who got it there with the
support other video-card compa-
nies presently provide. It’s time
someone calls Matrox out on its
omnipotent spew.

Tim Farris

I’ve been hosed. I bought a
Matrox Mystique video card about
eight months ago, and guess
what? The damn thing works no
more. So I did what any raving
lunatic would do, try to get
warranty service. First I tried to e-
mail the company and only
received a notice that someone
will get back to me within so
many business days. It’s been
four months now. Second, I tried
calling the retailer because
according to the manual you
must first go through the retailer
and they are supposed to ship it
back for you. The manager just
about laughed in my face and
said that it sounds like someone doesn’t want
to own up to their warranty. To make a long
story short, it’s been a little over four months
and no response from Matrox. Its customer
service is for shit and I will never buy a Matrox

product again. As for my fellow computer
geeks, always check out the track record of a
company before you lay down your dough.

Jo Kidd

Matrox Technical Support Manager Dave White
replies: Unfortunately, we have experienced some
difficulties in the past two months that have kept
us from delivering quick responses to end users.

In addition to changes in our technical support
team, the recent ice storm disaster in Quebec left
us understaffed and without complete electricity
for several weeks.

Since then, we have taken active steps to
rebuild our technical support. We have increased
our support staff and are continually training rep-
resentatives to deliver timely and thorough
responses to our customers. As well, we are
redesigning the technical support section on our
web site to include an online diagnostic database
providing a solution to known issues in less than
five minutes of connect time.

If you are still experiencing
problems, we recommend you contact
the dealer where you purchased your
Matrox card. Since we offer dealers
direct connection to technical
support, you should receive a speedy
resolution. Also, it may be still
within the dealer's return policy to
offer you a replacement or refund.

If this is not possible, contact
Customer Support Group at 514.685.0270
to have the product returned and repaired.
Please feel free to contact me personally
(dwhite@matrox.com) . I trust we can
resolve it to your satisfaction.

Con 56K

USR tech support is useless. I paid for the 56K
upgrade and that was a waste. I never connect-
ed at better than 26,400, and the upgrade did
not improve this. I removed the “prized” USR,
installed an Acer 33.6, and connected at 33.6.
My phone lines are three-years old and Bell
South only supports 14,400 voice and 9600
data. Don’t blame Ma Bell for USR’s hype and
lack of support for a chip burned at 24K.

John Whitehurst

56K? I just wanna get 28.8! I have a USR 33.6
modem and I connect to the Louisville, KY,

IBM Global Internet 33.6 line. Very few people
really use IBM in my area, and I am using a
brand new line installed by Bell South and a
line noise filter. The only speed I can connect at
is 26.6Kbps, which is horrific! I want to at least
reach 28.8 on my 33.6 modem dialing into a
33.6 line! By the way, all you people complain-
ing about getting 33.5 or 40.0 instead of 56Kbps
should just be happy you can reach something
other than my sub-28.8 speeds!

Matthew Jolley

Pro 56K

It amazes me that anyone would invest in a
technology that doesn’t work on their system. I
wouldn’t waste my money buying an old
MacOS to install on my PC, and I wouldn’t buy

an X2 without knowing if I have the proper
phone lines, or if my ISP can connect at that
speed. Before buying my X2, 1 researched. I
found a number that checked phone lines and
made sure they were up to “speed.” U.S.
Robotics set it up at 1.888.877.9248 (log in as
“line test” no quotes). It works for both K56flex
and X2. It only tests the line, after all. You don’t
even need a 56! Then I bought the modem.

Know what you’re dealing with before
throwing away your money to impress the
neighbors.

Steve Pohore

I’m a tech-support person for a modem manu-
facturer that produces 56K modems, and I’d
just like to set the record straight on all the
criticisms of 56 K modems. I keep hearing
people talk about these modems being a
“scam,” when it’s apparent these people don’t
realize the functionality of a 56 K modem.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think any

"No one is scamming you
about 56 K modems, you’re
just not paying attention to
what they are supposed to do.

tidl, and therefore the hum exists at 60 Hz, same
as the oscillation frequency of the power coming
from your wall socket. To solve this, you have to
buy (or build, it's easy and cheap) a ground loop
isolator. Once you have this installed, everything
will work just fine.

I used two 1:1 audio isolation transformers
that I bought at Radio Shack and a film con-
tainer from a 35mm film canister. Total cost,
$12.00 CDN. Pretty cheap fix for good sound.

All The News That Fits

Reading the paper version of the bootWire, it
becomes distressingly obvious just how long it
takes to bring an issue to press. Ouch! Here’s
an idea: Admit the magazine is not the right
place for breaking news and just concentrate
on keeping the info coming online. For those
of us who subscribe to the bootWire online,
the paper version adds no value, and let’s face
it, every bootReader should subscribe to the
bootWire listserve. Who needs month-old

breaking news in the age of the net?

Alan Robinson

company that produces 56K modems will say
you actually get 56K connect rates. Connect
rates aren’t the benefit of 56 K modems.

The first time I called in to AO(hel)L with
my 56K external, I connected at 24,000 bps.

But guess what? I downloaded a file during that
connection averaging about 5K/sec. My brother
has a local ISP and gets download rates of
lOK/sec sometimes. With my old 33.6, 1 never
got anywhere close to that, usually averaging
about 2K/sec. People call me whining about
how their new modem only connects at 40,000
bps, or sometimes 33,600. Get a clue, people.

No one is scamming you about 56K modems,
you’re just not paying attention to what they are
supposed to do. Throughput speeds, not con-
nect speeds, are the advantage of 56K modems.

Chris Brown

Rattle And Hum

In boot 18 Comm Port, reader Dan Hull
explained why I hear a hum from my SB 32
PnP. Is there some converter that would
convert the SB speaker output to line-level
output? I’d even breadboard a circuit, if needed.

John M. Wildenthal

bootReader Michael Oxner replies: One of your
readers complained about the “ gold standard ”
that he thinks exists among soundcards, saying
that you need a " Sound Blaster Gold'' to play
sound through your stereo from your soundcard or
else you'll get a loud hum instead. Not quite so.

I have the same, cheapo-deluxe SB16 sound-
card and had the same hum when I first connect-
ed it to my stereo. This is called a ground loop.
The two units are running at a different poten-

Editor-in-chiff Brad Dosland replies:

We agree that every bootReader should
be subscribed to our online newsfeed
(www.bootnet.com/bootwirelist.
html#subscribetobootwirelistserver) , but
the reality is that only some 20% of our
total print readership is actually tapped
into this vital source. For the rest of our readers,
and those who simply miss a day's posting, we try
to provide a capsule view of the most important
stories of the month in our print version's Nuggets
section, and we devote the bulk of our news pages
to a more in-depth analysis of the key stories
broken online. We believe this approach leverages
the best of both worlds.

Heathermania

I confess. I caught “Heathermania”! When I
pick up boot, the first thing I check is if
Heather Walton has submitted a tech
question to Comm Port. Keep us up to date
on what Heather does next.

Rodan, Heather groupie

Heather Walton was having swap file
problems with games (Comm Port, boot 18)
and wanted to know if more RAM would
help. Well, this tip could've saved her $150 on
that extra RAM. If you’re running Win95, you
can manually change the size of the swap file
so that it doesn’t constantly unload and load.

Go to Control Panel->System->
Performance->Virtual Memory. At the Virtual
Memory window, click “Let me specify my
own virtual memory settings”.

Make one huge swap file that doesn’t
need to be read to during laborious system
commands. First, enter the same number in
the Min and Max boxes. The safest way to
determine how much to use is to multiply
the amount of RAM you have by 2.5. In
Heather’s case, she should enter 80 for the
min and the max.

Now exit Windows and reboot. This tip

6 boot APR 98

works only if you aren't worried about disk
space. You can even make the file larger if
you wish. The secret is to keep the min and
the max the same.

Thomas A Duplessie

bootReader Heather Walton replies: I saw all the
questions about my letter “RAM Limits ” on
bootNet, and I may have some answers. I do still
use all 80MB I upgraded to. Even though my HX-
chipset motherboard only caches 64MB, it does not
affect system performance at all — except for those
benchmark results. I prefer to test with real-world
applications such as games. Like I said, my swap
file used to go constantly with 32MB of RAM, both
during the games and after shutting back to
Windows. It was very annoying, and 80MB of
RAM solved this problem completely. So what if it
only caches 64MB. I believe my 80MB is better
then just 64 with games such as GLQuake, Quake
II, and Jedi Knight. bootReaders: do not hesitate to
upgrade your RAM to as much as you can afford.
The games are so much more playable without
freezing up due to the swap file.

The Bleeth Shall Inherit
The Earth

I’ve subscribed for a little less
than a year now and I’ve noticed
that much of the hardware you
review is priced out of my reach.

The systems you review are
pretty sensuous, incredibly desir-
able, but let’s face it: We can’t all
be married to Yasmine Bleeth.

Most of us have Pam Dawber.

Sure, Pam Dawber’s cute and
everything, but she’s no Yasmine
Bleeth. We have to realize that we
can never have Yasmine; we have
to be satisfied with Pam Dawber,
who is really a fine woman in her
own right but just doesn’t have
the hardware.

Take, for example, the Intergraph TDZ
2000 you reviewed in boot 17. Sure I drooled
when I saw it. I ached. I yearned. But when I
saw the price tag, all I could do was glance to
Pam Dawber on my desktop and be resigned
to acceptable performance instead of kick-ass
performance.

Maybe you guys could review some Pam
Dawber systems. You know, systems that
guys like me can afford. Perhaps you could
even put a special tag on those articles so I
know better than to lust after something I can
never attain. You could put Yasmine Bleeth’s
picture right at the beginning of some articles
so us John Does would know immediately
that this was out of our league.

Ray Geroski

Executive editor Jon Phillips responds: Is your
machine Pam Dawber circa early 1980s or Pam
Dawber 1998? (Maybe your situation isn't so
bad.) We see your point, Ray, but boot celebrates
Pure PC Power, not Pure PC Mediocrity.

Technology moves in a single direction: forward. It
would be redundant to review P200s in 1998 — we

broke open those babies last year. The Intergraph
TDZ 2000 is an extreme example. In fact, we just
reviewed a kick-ass 333MHz Pentium II system
that costs less than what you might've paid for a
run-of-the-mill P200 MMX machine this month
last year. Indeed, technology is getting cheaper. So
don’t let Pam Dawber get you down — someday
you'll find your Yasmine Bleeth. Of course, that’s
easy for me to say — I'm doing Alicia Silverstone!

<sass>WYSIWYG</sass>

Scott Dahlstrom (Comm Port, boot 18) can take
his WYSI and shove it up his WYG! Go to any
self-respecting site, you won't find a bit of
WYSIWYG HTML. Even MS and Netscape
don’t use their own products! WYSIWYG web
editors are trash. To fix the pages, you need to
know HTML, and once you understand HTML,
you don’t want to use those crappy programs.
<ducttape> Scott’s mouth</ducttape>.

Quasar

Just my two cents on Shel Kimen’s boot 16
column: WYSIWYG sucks! Notepad or
HomeSite are best. People always complain
that you can’t make 2,000-page sites with
Notepad. BS! I’ve made sites with 3,000 pages
via WordPad! These people must
not appreciate the fact that big
sites use templates. They think
templates must only be available
in WYSIWYG editors.

Wrong!

The code those editors put
out is hard to read. With the
HTML I write, I know every-
thing’s going to look like in does
my head, and I can fine-tune
things until I’m satisfied. Old
coders like me know the tricks of
the trade when it comes to
HTML, and we get the job done.

Mike Shafer

_ . Postcards From
The Edge

Why the hell are Myst and Riven so high on
the sales charts? These titles truly suck and are
boring as hell. People see the colorful pictures
on the box and think: “Wow! This has to be
good with these graphics! And look at those
low system requirements!” Either that or the
sales charts are rigged. I believe the latter
because I know only one person, out of the
countless computer freaks I know, owns Myst,
and he says he hates it!

HakLord

IPX Gaming Network For
Nothing

One of my favorite multiplayer games is Quake,
particularly GLQuake. However it only accepts
IPX and TCP/IP multiplayer modes. I’ve con-
nected my two computers through Direct Cable
Connect. All the literature I’ve read says this is
a one-way-only connection. Guest has access
rights to host but not vice-versa.

It ain’t so.

As long as you’re connected using DCC

'

d> J

Cl

M

"We can't all be
married to

Yasmine

Bleeth

jj

and the common protocol is IPX, you have a
playable IPX network. With Quake, I get
almost zero lag.

Another perk to this network is that the
host does have access to the guest. Open up
an application such as Word and go to Open
File. In the File name dialog box, type the
UNC of the guest and the folder you wish to
open (i.e. \\laptop\c\mydocuments ) and the
directory appears.

This method doesn’t allow the host to map
network drives, but there’s a fix for that.
Throughput seems to be at .1Mbps to 1Mbps.

To map network drives on the host for the
guest, you must install a second adapter in the
network control panel. Mine happens to be an
AOL adapter. After it is installed, uninstall and
reinstall IPX/SPX so that it is bound to the
AOL adapter. Now when you start Win95,
you’ll be prompted for a network login name
and password. As long as no password is
needed for DCC, none needs to be entered.

Actually you can use TweakUI to log on
for you.

Now you can map the guest’s drives and
resources just like a real network. I hope this
helps gamers at odds with games that don’t
support certain multiplayer options.

Erik Read

Quaking In NT

In reply to the Comm Port letter “No Quake
For NT” in boot 18, Yes! You can run DOS-
based Quake in NT. Before there was
GLQuake, there was WinQuake. WinQuake is
a little app that you drop in your Quake folder
instead of Quake.exe when you’re on an NT
machine. WinQuake makes valid calls to the
video subsystem instead of to hardware, and
you can run it full-screen or in a window. I
was fragging people on NT running
WinQuake before I knew what 3Dfx was. You
can get WinQuake at redwood.stomped.com/
in the essential files section.

Pete Bielek

Pay To Play

Accolade’s free upgrade patch for Test Drive 4
is the most commendable, upstanding, and
righteous thing a game developer could do for
the gaming public. Electronic (F)Arts and all
of its subsidiary companies would do well to
emulate this trend. As it stands, we know who
runs the show at EA. The marketers and the
bean-counters!

And I’m willing to bet my fat aunt Sally’s
moustache that we’ll be paying another $50 for
the multiplayer add-on to Wing Commander
Prophecy, a feature the game was supposed to
ship with. In fact, Origin’s 1997 catalog still
advertises multiplayer and cooperative modes
for WCP. Does that constitute fraud? It’s
obvious the accounting department at EA
wanted a chunk of the “Christmas cash”
regardless of the fact that the game needed
more time. Does the term “bait and switch”
sound appropriate? EA would be heroes if they
put out a free multiplayer upgrade to WCP.
Psygnosis did it for Wipeout XL. Considering

APR 98 boot

EA’s current trend with charging full price for
minor upgrades (Need for Speed 2 and Privateer
2), I doubt well see any generosity from them.

It might suck to wait and wait and wait for
a game, but wouldn’t you rather get a game
that does what it said it would?

I’ll not pay for another EA title if it doesn’t
stop making us pay for minimal upgrades. I
urge other gamers to follow suit. And now,

I’ll step down off the soapbox!

Scott Myers

Senior editor Andrew Sanchez replies: We hear
your pain and anguish, fellow bootBrother.

It is unfortunate that games such as Wing
Commander Prophecy did not ship completed.
While we didn’t mark them down too much for
it — after all, the main Wing Commander series
was always a “ you against the alien world ” —
we know many are pissed.

From what Origin has told us, there are
plans to do a multiplayer Wing Commander
game using the Vision engine, but it will be
a free-standing product that you’ll have to
buy. Hopefully, it will be more of a Wing
Commander Armada-styled game, as opposed
to straight Prophecy -esque dogfighting.

The Croft Super Show

I didn’t get upset when you pooh-poohed my
motherboard. When you dogged my monitor,

I just laughed. And when you said my
Monster Graphics board was going to be
obsolete in three months, I shrugged my
shoulders. But now I must stand up and be
counted. How dare you give my beloved Lara
Croft a 6? Please give Sean Downey 10 lashes
for overlooking the true meaning of the game.

I couldn’t care less about polygon collision
detection. I just want to back
her up in a comer and watch
her carefully rendered
boobies bounce up and down.

What’s wrong with you guys?

Matthew J. Pratt

Fear Of A Black
Processor

I use a Dual P-Pro/WinNT 4
system for 3D/2D graphics despite my smol-
dering resentment of the Wintel regime. It
seems the Pentium II is just being thrown out
by Intel to collect money from its users until it
comes up with something actually new and
improved. Although I will spring for the P-Pro
MMX upgrade, I am extremely leery of the
nefarious schemes of the Wintel juggernaut.
I’m waiting steadfast before buying a new
system, and I’ll probably buy a new graphics
card instead.

Roughly, when will the true sweet-spot of
new system acquisition present itself for
someone like me?

Curtis Harvey

Executive editor Jon PhiUips replies: There is no
obvious sweet spot, Curtis, and you will never be
truly satisfied. Whether you buy a new CPU
today or a year from now, Intel (or AMD, or the

Next Big Thing) will always have a better, faster,
stronger processor waiting in the wings to frus-
trate you. Intel’s business model is based on con-
tinuous forward development. It hooks users like
the opium trade, and once you’re addicted,
you’re a sucker for life.

Staight From The Source

After reading Alex St. John’s idea for DirectOS,

I was wondering why someone should tell the
Windows CE people about this. Didn’t you
realize that it already (almost) exists? Last time
I checked, there as an operating system called
DOS. It wasn’t exactly what you asked for but...
It's small and simple, it has plenty of function
hooks to play with, it’s backwards compatible,
it could be easily fitted with a better FS
(Fat32?), it could be equipped with an updated
kernel with a flat memory model, and it could
be equipped with a very simple graphical/3D
API (hey, it’s Windows 1.0, with 3D!).

Before it did preemptive multitasking,
Windows did cooperative time slicing. This is
pretty much what St. John was talking about. A
“master” or primary app (such as your favorite
game) only releases a small time-slice out to
other system functions (TCP stack, clock, etc.).

I know St. John wanted drivers attached to each
app, but that’s asking a lot from game develop-
ers. DOS game developers do that now, but the
VESA VBE is too slow to be useful, and creating
a 3D driver for each app would be too much.

Now, integrating an OpenGL engine to
the OS... that would provide a 3D API.

So now all we need to do is take DOS and
give it a real FS, a flat memory model, a simple
graphics/windowed API, and an OpenGL
engine, then write well-behaved apps that don’t
do stupid Windows-like things.

So does anybody wanna pour over the
OpenDOS source?

Anthony Iannone

Columnist Alex St. John replies: Part of the
intended humor in the article is that the
Acronym for DirectOS... is DOS. DOS does have
several practical problems — being 16-bit is a
major one, and not having the idiot-proof file
system I described. Also, I presume that
DirectOS has a driver model, so third parties can
develop standard drivers for it. Those would be
the drivers games shipped with, not ones design-
ers had to make themselves. It’s the same model
we chose for DirectX: the universe makes the
drivers, and each game ships with the versions
it’s been tested with. I’m inclined to think that
Linux might be a stronger starting point.

What I meant by telling the CE guys is that
Windows CE has many of the correct characteris-

tics, and it’s being ported to the next generation
Sega with DX driver support. The trouble is,
Microsoft thinks CE is a great OS for handhelds
and car dashboards. Microsoft doesn’t understand
that with a little cleaning up it’s very close to a
great consumer OS, possibly a much better
consumer OS then the bloated monstrosity they’re
making now (Win98).

And I’d love to see the OpenDOS source.

Fool’s Quest

Why would any fool want to put two Voodoo
2 cards into one machine?

Billy Mills

Senior editor Andrew Sanchez replies: Why?

Why ask why?! For massive power, that’s why!
Imagine playing games at 800x600 or
1024x768 locked in at 60jps — under any circum-
stances! Will Riva 128 do this? Nope. Verite
V2200? Nope. Not even Intel’s mighty i740
(reviewed on page 65 ) can attain this Herculean
feat. But dual Voodoo 2s operating in SLI can
guarantee arcade-destroying performance in your
desktop PC.

Makin’ Flippy Flop

When will the Sony/Fuji replacement for the
dogged floppy drive ship? You know, the one
that’s faster than a Zip, twice as big, and still
manages to read original 3. 5 -inch floppies? I
just fried my floppy drive and I want one.

McKay Stewart

News editor Bryan Del Rizzo replies: According
to Sony, the HiFD — a 200MB floppy drive that
is backward compatible with your current
1.44MB floppies — should become available in
late spring. No formal pricing has been

announced, but you should
guesstimate that it will fall
somewhere under $200.

We loved the Super Disk,
but sadly, it went nowhere.
We just hope the same fate
doesn’t befall the HiFD.

Feelin’ Centered

You ripped the NEC
6200MX laptop ( boot 12) for various reasons.

I noticed that you disliked the fact that the
13.3-inch screen is not really centered. Last
month, you gave a the Micron Transport XKE
233MHz a 10 out of 10, but the picture of the
laptop was cut-off. Is the screen on the
Micron uneven too?

Rahul Sood

News editor Bryan Del Rizzo replies: No! But due
to space constraints on the updated review, our
assistant art director got allfancy-schmancy on us
and cut off the comer. Be sure to check out this
month's notebook dissection feature on page 42.

Assistant art director Sherry Monarko replies:

Fancy -schmancy my ass! I had to shove the
image up in the corner so our long-winded
Canadian news editor could jam in 50 extra
words.

7 couldn’t care less about polygon

collision detection I just want to back
her up in a corner and watch her carefully
I, rendered boobies bounce up and down. "

8 boot APR 98

JM

PowerPR

I just read the interview with Hossein Yassaie
and Charles Bellfield in Lip (boot 18), and all I
can say is “what a complete pile of bullshit.”
Once again the PowerPR crew from NEC/
Videologic would have us believe that they are
only moments away from releasing the fastest
3D accelerator known to man. The two of
them should have rehearsed their answers a
bit more thoroughly before the interview.
Answering questions with questions and
basically lying about the performance of their
hardware has become almost second nature
to this gang. When will NEC realize that the
performance of their design will sell more
hardware than the silly games used by their
marketing department ever will?

Big Dave Short

PowerVR’s Bellfield says, “I personally
believe that lighting and texturing of the
PowerVR PCX2 of Quake II is far superior,
for example, than the 3Dfx version, whose use
of color lighting looks way over the top.” He
is definitely on crack. Please perform drug
tests on future interviewees, I don’t want
opinions from crackheads. To even say this,
much less mean it, indicates that he is at the
very least a moron. Colored lighting is imple-
mented by the software, not by the hardware.

Bellfield also says, “Hook is comparing a
$99 PowerVR-enabled product to those from
our competitors' that range from three-to-ten
times that retail price, and that will not be
available for three to six months.” Excuse me,
but where has Brian Hook ever compared a
PowerVR to a $1,000 piece of hardware? The
Obsidian boards? Anyone with half a brain
knows he only uses Obsidian boards for fun
and for a reference point. For purposes of
consumer-level cards, he uses Voodoo, Riva,
Verite, etc. So far as I know, he actually
compares the $99 PowerVR to the $150 3Dfx
chips or $150 to $200 Riva 128 and V2x00
chips. The V2100, for example costs less than
the PowerVR and spanks it in every way. This
means that in actuality, Hook is comparing
the PowerVR to competing chipsets that cost
either about the same or at most 2x as much.

And every one of them spanks the PowerVR.

And in March, Diamond will ship the
Monster 2 for $250. That fire-breathing, ass-
kicking piece of hardware will only cost 2.5x as
much. You’re telling me Matrox is gonna sell
m3D’s for $50? I don’t think so. The PowerVR
is dead. These guys are smoke and mirrors, or
to put it another way, they are full of shit.

MJ

I’m sure you’ve gotten quite a response con-
cerning those two jokers from Videologic
and NEC already, but I felt I had to add my
two cents. I have never read a more evasive
interview in my life. These guys must be
taking lessons from Bill Clinton. Every
answer seemed to be either a half-truth or
just downright ridiculous. In particular, the
chip they claim will better Voodoo 2 perfor-
mance for around $100. How long will we

have to wait for this? If they pull this off
within six months of Voodoo 2’s release, I
will eat all six pages of this article. If it
comes any later, they shouldn’t bother
because 3Dfx will have another chip that will
embarrass them even further.

Rick Lowes

It was totally kick ass that you followed up
your 3Dfx interviews with a PowerVR inter-
view, but then you utterly wimped out when
it came to the folks at PowerPR [sic]
cheating on the JPA benchmarks. You let
them off with some mumbo jumbo about
beta drivers and standing by their numbers.
If I didn’t already know the
story, I would have had no idea
what you or they were talking
about. Everyone who followed
what happened knows that
PowerVR blatantly cheated on
the benchmarks, regardless of
the pathetic excuse about being
“representative of final drivers.”
boot was my one shining hope
of nailing these guys to the wall
on this, and you blew it.

As a final note, I find it
interesting that despite having
cheated on the 3D benchmarks
to inflate PowerVR’s score,

Bellfield later has the nerve to
take the holier-than-thou
attitude that they do not spend
time optimizing for bench-
marks like their competitors.

Well, I guess you don’t need to
optimize for benchmarks when
you can just flat-out code your
drivers to report false numbers.

Chris Ciccarello

"When will NEC
realize that the
performance of
their design will
sell more
hardware than
the silly
games used
by their market
ing department

...He Loves Me Not

Just perused your trial issue... Why would you
expect anyone firm of mind and wishing to
oneself and one’s children well [sic] to allow this
“kinda-outta-reapin’-kickass’’ pile of magotry in
one’s house? This writing style should be as
illegal as it is to defecate in public. In fact, being
a pure, unprovoked deviancy (rather than an
inappropriate fulfillment of a legitimate call of
nature), it has to be worse. Perpetrators should
be hanged, drawn, and quartered, after which a
public holiday may be declared — to celebrate
such a good riddance. Won’t ya’ll drop kick-
assin’ dead, you creeps.

Len Belyakov

Cut, Copy, Paste

In our review of Falcon 4.0 ( boot
18, p.69), we said it was the first
combat sim to support air-to-air
refueling. Actually, Tactical
Fighter Experiment (TFX) was
the first sim to do so.

Yup, we got it wrong and we
know it. The price for the Sony
MX-T4135 home theater system
shown in the February 1998
edition of Pure Lust was
WRONG. We priced only the
sound system. The actual price
of the whole system is $3,599.95.
We regret the error and any con-
fusion it may have caused.

News editor Bryan Del Rizzo
replies: Interviews are a tricky
business. We try to present a
balanced Qd[A so you, the reader, get a feeling as
to what these people are really like. You don’t
need us to nail them to the wall... they did a fine
job of that themselves. The whole point of our
interview was to let PowerVR tell their side of
the story, and ultimately their answers reflect
loudly on their company, business strategies, and
products.

For the record, we weren’t too happy about
the content in the inteiview. VideoLogic and
NEC had promised us a wealth of information
before the interview (including new product
specs and official “ comment ” on our 3Dfx
interview with Scott Sellers), but when it came
time to talk, they clammed up. Our original
interview had over two pages of “no comment, ”
“we can’t comment on that,” and “we aren't
allowed to discuss that” answers that we had to
edit out. In fact, we had to do a follow-up
interview after we got back on U.S. soil just to
get what skimpy meat and potatoes we did
manage to pull out of them.

But obviously, savvy boot readers can read
between the lines.

In our modem roundup ( boot 18,
p 79), we state that Trio
Communications Suite does not
include an uninstall program.
But as a clever bootReader
pointed out, it does. If you want
to uninstall, insert the CD again
and select “install” from the Trio
menu. You’ll get a screen (even-
tually) that gives you four
options: typical install, custom install, modify
installation, and exit. If you go to modify,
there is an option to uninstall the Trio
package.

Eagle-eyed reader B. Armstrong noticed a dis-
crepancy between two reviews in boot 18 dis-
cussing the Diamond FireGL video card. In
our review of the card on page 82, we state
that the max 24-bit resolution is 1280x1024.
But in the Micron Powerdigm XSU review on
page 72, we state that the video subsystem
maxes out at 1024x768. This video subsystem
comprises a FireGL video card and a Hitachi
19-inch monitor. That particular configuration
could not run 3D Studio Max at 1280x1024 in
true color. Therein lies the conflict.

In boot 19’s cover story on Deschutes, we
mistakenly printed in the Deschutes
processor comparision chart that the Slot 1
Deschutes processors will have 1MB and
2MB of L2 cache. This is incorrect — 512K is
the maximum limit. 0

9

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©1998 Micron Electronics. Inc. All Rights reserved. Micron Electronics is not responsible tor omissions or errors in typography or photography. All purchases are subject to availability. Prices and specifications may be
changed without notice; prices do not include shipping and handling and any applicable taxes. 30-day money-back policy does not include return freight and original shipping/handling charges, applies only to Micron
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sion, they’ve have introduced increased quality and
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ing), and character generation tools that will help you
produce professional quality videos right on your desk-
top. This is a 30-days trial version. From Ulead.

iXPtol

QuarkXPress

Internet Games

Ultim@te Race Pro Ultim@te Race Pro takes you on a
high-speed thrill ride. You’ll feel the thrust of our
dynamic 3D engine (based on Kalisto’s unique LibSys
technology) and be amazed by the visual impact. The
control is yours! Choose your 3D racing environment
according to time of day, weather conditions, and
opponents. From Microprose.

QuarkXPress 4.0 QuarkXPress is more than just a
page-layout software. An integrated publishing pack-
age, QuarkXPress lets you combine pictures, text,
typography, writing, editing, and printing — in one
application. From Quark.

[NETWORK PRODUCTIVITY KIT|

'P Glicm

Web Browsers

NetMeeting

Network Productivity Kit Spouse.Net, the connectivity
tool for the domestic PC user, allows two PCs to share
a single Internet connection over one modem using a
LAN network. Both PCs can browse the web, manage
separate e-mail accounts, download data, use
Newsgroups, Telnet, and more. From JC Research.

[COR EL

mum

CorelDraw 8 CorelDraw 8 is a complete suite of pow-
erful graphics applications and supporting utilities that
delivers the latest in design technology, including pro-
ductivity enhancing features, interactive tools, and sup-
port for Internet publishing. It includes Enhanced
CorelTutor, 40,000 clipart images and symbols, 1 ,000
photos, and 1 ,000 TrueType and Type 1 fonts. This is a
30-day trial version. From Corel.

Agile HTML Editor Apart from your browser, Agile
HTML Editor is all you need to create and maintain your
web site. Agile is a professional web authoring package
that takes the hard work out of being a Webmaster. It
supports all the main HTML standards and includes
comprehensive reference material on HTML.

This is a 30-day trial version. From Compware.

Digital Chisel 3 Digital Chisel 3 is the first all-in-one
authoring tool designed especially to meet the needs of
education. The look of the program and its functionality
can be customized for different ages and skill levels.
This is a 30-day evaluation. From Pierian Spring
Software.

The Interstate 76 Arsenal The Interstate 76 Arsenal
includes the Gold Edition, the award winning game now
optimized with 16-bit 3D hardware acceleration,
enhanced graphics and difficulty levels, an optimized
engine for increased performance, new cars and
weapons, and other enhancements. From Activision.

DIGITAL CHISEL

12 boot APR 98

boo t D I S C

Pull out your PDA and hook it up, ’cause
we’ve gathered over 100MB of the best soft-
ware you’re likely to find. Whether you use the
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Newton MessagePad 2000 or 2100, the
Avigol 0, the Philips Velo-1 , the HP300LX,
320LX or 360LX, the NEC Mobile Pro 200,

400, or 450, the Compaq PC Companion Cl 20
or Cl 40, the Casio Cassoipeia A-1 0 or A-1 1 ,
or the LG/Goldstar GP40M, look to the
bootDisc for all your software needs.

r Fear not if you’re holding a naked edition of
boot with no bootDisc CD-ROM. You can sub-
scribe to the full magazine/CD-ROM bundle,
and even order individual copies of the bootDisc,
by calling customer service at 800.274.3421 . Each
month, the bootDisc is stuffed with game demos,
application demos, utilities, and patches-so don’t
miss this treasure trove of valuable software.

now that pr tfe is
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AVIGO SOFTWARE

Avigo Manuals

Game 1

Game 2

Mine Field

Number Puzzle

PS6155 Address to CSV File

Converter

DirectLink 1 .0
Document Loader
Drink Mixing Guide
E-Texts for the Pilot
Ebonylvory 1 .0
English-Spanish Dictionary
Explorer

Fighter Pilot Software
Fill Up vl.1
FlashHack 1 .0
Font Display
FretBoard v0.9
Gamer’s Die Roller
Generic Conduit Manager
GetDirections
Hand Fax Demo
HandMap1.3e
Hand Stamp Pro
HI-NOTE

Holiday Planner vl .2a
Hot Sync Update
Hourz Pro
HTML Reference
HTML Suite
Image Creator

Image Compression Manager 1 .0
Image Previewer
Image Viewer
JFile 2.2

JFile Converter 2.0
JShopper 1 ,4a

Kar Kare Vehicle Tracking Database

Language Dictionary

LaunchPad 1.11

ListMaker 1 ,0b2

Loan Wizard Pro

Lotto vl .0

MakeDoc Text Converter
Memo PLUS
Menu Hack
Metronome

Mobile Account Manager vl .2
My Little Buddy
NetNews
New Folder

Online - VT100 Emulation

Outliner 1 .2

PAL 1.31

PalmJongg

PalmMap 1.0

PALM OS V2.0.4

PalmPilot Desktop 2.1 Upgrade

Palmscape Preview

PalmTelnet 0.31

Palm YATS (Yet Another Time

Synchronizer)

Photo Album with Grayscale
Pilot Convert 2.0a
Pilot File Dumper
PilotMark 1 .0
Pilot OS Update 1.06
Pilot StopWatch vl .10
PocketSynth vl .23
PocketChess 1 .0
PowerHack 0.93
PPix

Programmer’s Calculator v2
PV Poker 1 .Oa

Pylon Up-Linking for Lotus Notes

Quick Tip

eDo

SafeHack PalmPilot 1 .0

Secret 1 5a
SelectHack
Shopping-List vl .4
SilkHack v0.2
Smartshop vl .1c
Sun Compass vl .0
Tarot Assistant
TC Calc
TealDoc
TealEcho
TealGlance!

TealMeat
TealPaint
Thesaurus
Thought Mill
Tide Tool

TimecodeTool v.1.0
TimerZ
Today
ToDo PLUS
Top Gun Telnet
Trans AOL
Translate vl.11
Translation Dictionary
Tricorder VII
U.S. Constitution
Walk Thru
ymcal 0.3b1

PSION SOFTWARE

3T Simple File Manager
5Time To Do and Task Manager
5Xpense

abp - a banking program
Ascii Calculator
Atomic vl .2
Backlite+Plus v2.02
BatCheck
BioBase
CallCalc vl.00
Casino Blackjack vl .1
CharMap 1 .0
Concept!

Connect 4 vl.1

Contrast Manager

Converti

Convert5 Pro

Crackshot v0.8

Dialer

DP5Bank

Dungeon vl.1

EasyFax

Easy Note 1.3

Encrypt-lt! vl .0

Extended ToDo Manager vl .1 b

File Zip & Unzipper vl.OOF

Form Calculator 1 .0

Fortune vl .0

FreeCell v2.02

FrotzS5 vl .2

Fuel Consumption Manager vl ,0b

Global Find vl.1

Haunted House

Hearts vl.1

HERMES

HexCalc

HomeBank BETA 1.2
Home Inventory Program vl .Ob
Home Inventory Program vl .Oa
Invoice Manager 1.4.2
Jongjong32 vl.1 8
JWIN for EP0C32 V1.05F

KeySwitch
LightBox vl .0
Light Cycles vl.1
M5Logger vl.1
MasterMind
MBMView vl .21
Memory5

Message Suite (1 .OOF)

Message Suite vl .OOF
MM version 3.1
MyCar
0PL32

Personal Accounts Suite S5Bank
vl .1b

Piano Helper

Piano, Tuner & Metronome
Plan5 version 5.0
Pocket Packet
Poker

Psi-Mapper-Great Britain 5.3
Psi-Mapper-London 2.3
PsiBank Bank Account Manager
Psion screen saver
PsiTris v1.13f

PsiWin 2 Microsoft Office 97 Plug-in

PSolly

Pssst vl .2

Robo Dungeon vl .0

RPNCalc

S5EVENT vl.2

S5Notes Jotter vl .Ob

S5UTILS - Utility & Conversion

V1.05F

S5Utils Utility & Conversion vl .05F

SeaStrike 5 vl .02

Shanghai vl.2

Shortcut vl .0

Sleeper 3.0

Sleeper v3.0

SolarMap v2.0

Solitaire 5 vl.1

Splitz & Joinz

StartUpPlus v2.07

Statistics vl .0

StopWatch v2.1 a

Super Puzzle Engine

Swapper vl .02

SwitchTask v2.00

Thankyou vl .0

Thesaurus Link vl .04

Thesaurus Link vl.07

Time Plan 1.1

Trivia vl .3

UK Pocket Directory vl .4
Utilities v5.03
VacTrac5 Version 1 .0.1
War vl.O

Web World v5.00a
Wine Manager 1.2.1
WoridTime vl.O
XChange 1.1
Yatzee V2.1a

CalliGrapher
Database Backup
Desktop Clock
Dial Tone Sounds
Drop4

DSound sh3
DSound mips
FaxPlus

Financial Calculator

H-PC Explorer 1.1

Handheld PC File Converter

l-Cliing

Inscribe

Keep Track

Martians

Mfcwce.dll sh3

Mfcwce.dll mips

Mipssh3.txt

Musical Instruments Wallpaper

Pocket Crossword

Pocket Change

Pocket MBA-Calculator

Pocket Dial4Me

PocketSwap

Quote Ticker Bar

Star Wars Wallpaper

VisualCE

WyndMail

NEWTON SOFTWARE

NEWTON SOFTWARE FOR
ALL MESSAGEPADS

IrDA Printing Enhancement Package

Upgrade

Mouse vl.1

NEWK1.0

Newton Press 1.1 Update
Newton Backup Utility vl .0.1
Paperback 2.0
Stuffitt Expander vl .0
StyleWriter Printer Package Upgrade

NEWTON SOFTWARE FOR
1.x MESSAGEPADS

ExtraPkg: Newton Package Extractor

Newton Package Installer vl.1

PackXTract 1 .0

Schedule-2-Go

WinNewtl.11

XPkg vl.O

WINDOWS CE
SOFTWARE FOR MIPS

CometDefenseSetup
Daughter In The Box
dtopmips
invaders

Jimmy Quick Menu

LifeMIPS

Master

myftpl bl mips
ppaddemo
QTZMips
quicktext„demo
Sabotage
Space Invaders
TankZone 3D
VGBCEm

NEWTON SOFTWARE FOR
2.x MESSAGEPADS

ModemBridge vl .5
Newton Toolkit 1 .6b5
Newton Internet Enabler (NIE)
Package Buddy
PageNOW!

PILOT SOFTWARE

Abroad! 1 .3

Address Book 1 .3e

Agenda 0.61b

Airline #’s & Websites

AlarmHack vl .1

ALCALC: Al Weiner’s Calculator

AportisDoc

AWK Quick Reference

Battery Hack

Bill of Rights

BioChart

BioRhythms

Blackjack 1 .0

BPM2Delay vl.2

CalConvert for documentation

Calculator Hack

CAS Library Runtime

Chipmunk Tiny Basic

Chronos

ClipHack vl.1

ClockHack 3.0

Commute

CookBook 1 .0

CoPilot

Countdown

Date Calculator, v0.0.5
DeskPilot
DigiPet World
DinkyPad

WINDOWS CE SOFTWARE
FOR SH3

BASICE

Boomeran

CometDefenseSetup
Daughter In The Box
dtopsh3
invaders

Jimmy Quick Menu

LifeSH3

ppaddemo

QTZSH3

quicktext_demo

Sabotage

Space Invaders

TankZone 3D

wlha_a21sh

WINDOWS CE
SOFTWARE

WINDOWS CE SOFTWARE
FOR MIPS & SH3

MIPS & SH3 Software
Animals Wallpaper
Backgammon
Blox

1

S3 Acquires
Coveted
Exponential
Patents

boot has
learned that
graphics chip-
maker S3 has
won the cloak-and-dagger
auction for the much
sought-after Exponential
patents. It was previously
believed that Intel beat out
bidders such as AMD, Cyrix,
and Digital for the rights in
an attempt to protect its
Merced technology.

The Exponential portfolio
of 45 patents covers the key
technologies behind a high-
speed 64-bit microprocessor
capable of running both
CISC and RISC code, which
is also the goal of Intel’s
Merced chip, which is
expected in 1 999. The
Exponential patents were
filed before Intel’s, so they
would hold precedent in any
infringement suits.

It is unknown what S3
intends to do with the
patents (for which it report-
edly paid anywhere from
$5 to $10 million). The
company is losing the battle
on the 3D-accelerator front
and is ill-prepared to go up
against mighty Intel in the
CPU market. One possibility
is that S3 may leverage the
“Prior Art” patents to get
licensing fees out of Intel.
More likely is the option of
S3 building an integrated
chip to compete with Cyrix’s
MediaGX.

Intel Gives Cyrix
License To Clone

In a move that
startled even
the most
battle-hardy
bootEditors, Intel and
Cyrix have resolved a patent
infringement lawsuit that —
get this — gives Cyrix access
to all of Intel’s patents,
allowing the company to
engineer Pentium II clone
chips via reverse engineer-
ing, without the threat of
lawsuit.

The cross-licensing
agreement doesn’t cover all
of Intel’s Pentium II intellec-
tual property, especially
since Intel was smart
enough to protect many of
its design features by desig-
nating them as official
“trade secrets.”

Despite this recent
victory, Cyrix’s Big Daddy-
National Semiconductor—
has admitted it missed its
revenue and earnings
targets for the latest quarter
due to manufacturing short-
falls of its MediaGX 233MHz
processor.

Netscape
Considers Selling
Off
Parts

Reeling
from
fourth-
quarter
losses and facing relentless
competition from Microsoft,
Netscape Communications
is considering selling por-
tions of its company, the
Wall Street Journal recently
reported.

At press time, Netscape
was having “serious discus-
sions” with America Online,
Sun Microsystems, Oracle,
and IBM, all of which have a
vested interest in seeing
Netscape continue as a
thorn in Microsoft’s side.

There’s no timeline for
any buyouts or specifics on
the situation other than a
rumor that AOL is interested
in purchasing Netscape’s
web site.

HP To Port Java To
Merced

Hewlett-Packard has
announced it will port and
optimize Sun Microsystems’
Java development language
to Intel’s Merced technology
and expand its jump-start
advantage program to
include key Java Internet
developers such as Ariba
Technologies (developers
of operating resource-

15 >

Nimantics

Disappears

Into Thin Air

OWNER ACCUSED OF FRAUD AND DECEPTION

I n early January, boot began
receiving phone calls and
e-mails regarding the apparent
disappearance of Nimantics, a
mail-order notebook company
based in Tustin, CA. We were
familiar with the company,
having reviewed a few of its
products in prior issues of boot and
visited with the company at Comdex in
Las Vegas. We were surprised to learn
of its demise. But after a simple
Usenet query returned
hundreds of messages
from disgruntled cus-
tomers detailing their
frustrations and annoy-
ances in dealing with
the company, we natu-
rally attributed its disap-
pearance to a traditional
Chapter 11.

A sad tale for sure,
but bankruptcies are a common
occurrence these days. However, upon
digging deeper, boot has learned that
this may not be a simple case of a
company shutting down operations,
but instead, a bizarre situation
involving possible premeditated
fraud, embezzlement, and misleading
business practices.

Since Nimantics was originally
founded in Irvine, CA, and then later
relocated to Tustin, CA, we contacted
the respective city halls to determine
whether Nimantics was ever issued a
valid business license. According to the
City Licensing Department in Irvine (a
license isn’t required in the city of
Tustin), a license was issued to
Nimantics in August 1995 and regis-
tered to Nimesh Desai, the apparent
owner, boot had never actually dealt
with Desai— our point of contact had
always been Nick Ray, Nimantics’ sales
manager— so you can imagine our
surprise when we were informed by
the Irvine police department that
Desai and Ray were actually one and
the same! It appears that Desai— or

Ray, as we knew him— used an
assortment of aliases that also includ-
ed the names Chuck Jones and Chuck
Smith. Since Nimantics had not con-
tacted Irvine City Hall to file a notifi-
cation of bankruptcy, the original
license issued in 1995 is still valid.

We then contacted the Better
Business Bureau to request a company
rating. According to William Mitchell,
the president of the agency’s Irvine
office, Nimantics was rated as having

an “unsatisfactory business perfor-
mance record.” Mitchell informed us
his agency had compiled a report
based on hundreds of complaints—
a lengthy rap sheet. Although the
specifics of each complaint are not
made public, boot learned the list
included allegations of the sale of
defective merchandise; a failure to
issue refunds on returned merchan-
dise; a failure to honor warranties; and
a failure to return merchandise sent in
for warranty repair or exchange. We
also discovered that whenever the BBB
intervened on a customer’s behalf,
Nimantics would indicate it had taken
care of the problem, when in fact, it
had not. “The company had responded
to some complaints by indicating an
adjustment had been made, but
customers generally disputed the
response,” said Mitchell. “In many
other cases, the company [Nimantics]
did not respond at ail.”

After discovering he was living
with his parents in Tustin, boot
attempted to contact Nimesh Desai—
a.k.a. Nick Ray— for this story, but

"I sent a laptop back
for a refund of
$2,300 and have
received nothing,”
says a customer.

14 boot APR 98

WIRE

when we called the phone number
registered to him, he refused comment,
claiming his name was “Joe” and he
was just “house-sitting.” However, a
former employee of Nimantics, no
doubt impassioned by the anguished
pleas echoing in the Usenet news-
groups, posted a reply detailing the
company’s sudden collapse, boot has
verified the validity of the posting and
has agreed to keep the identity of the
employee confidential to avoid any
possible retaliation.

“To all former Nimantics cus-
tomers,” read the posting, “Nimesh
Desai... and co-owner April Smith
closed Nimantics on December 11,
1997. The employees were informed it
was a business decision and to clean
out their desks and leave.” The
employee told boot that each employ-
ee was given a hand-written check and
told to get out (surprisingly, the checks
didn’t bounce). However, before they
left, some employees inquired about
the status of the systems waiting to be
serviced (approximately 50 in total)
and offered to ship them back to the
customers. They were told not to worry
about them, and those 50 systems
have since disappeared.

“I sent a laptop back for a refund of
$2,300 and have received nothing,”
said Dean Savalli, a former customer.
“My credit-card company says I waited
too long to dispute the bill, and now I
have to pay for a product I don’t have.”

So should you avoid using a mail-
order company altogether? Probably
not, but there are a few things you
can do to protect your investment.

For one, contact the Better Business
Bureau in the vendor’s area. Although
it won’t officially endorse or recom-
mend a product or company, it will
provide a report detailing the
company’s history, free of charge.
Second, forget about using the vendor
for any repair or warranty work.

“If you elect to ship your system

back to the vendor, once it leaves
your hands, it’s pretty much out of
your control,” said Mitchell. “If it
breaks down, even if it’s under war-
ranty, use a local repair company.”
Mitchell also stresses that under
no circumstances should you purchase
anything from a company that claims
it is no longer accepting credit card
payments. “Companies such as Visa
or MasterCard will revoke their ser-
vices if too many charges are disput-
ed,” he said. “If the company won’t
accept your credit card, then take
your business elsewhere.”

And what to do if you are taken
for a ride? Contact the Office of the
Attorney General in the state where
the company is doing business. If it
gets enough complaints, it could
launch an investigation resulting in
possible prosecution. Second, make
sure you register a complaint with
the Better Business Bureau. Filing a
report with the local police depart-
ment and even the FBI is also a good
idea; however, the FBI will only
launch an investigation if the fraud
amount is over $50,000.

At press time, boot has learned that
Desai is once again using the name
Nick Ray and has opened up a busi-
ness named AS&D in Tustin, CA. We
called AS&D, but were unable to speak
to anyone named Nick, Nemish, or
Chuck. We did however, reach a recep-
tionist who warned us, “you don’t want
to buy anything from these guys ... the
FBI and police are after them.”

And soon, the U.S. Postal Service
may be too. Since Nimantics may have
committed mail fraud, the U.S.P.S. has
federal jurisdiction in bringing addi-
tional charges against Nimantics and
Desai. Postal authorities have been
notified and are launching an investi-
gation of the matter.

Check out the bootNet web site for
additional information regarding this
investigation. 0

> 14

management applications)
and Web Logic (maker of
the Tengah Java applica-
tion server).

HP is establishing a
Java/Merced porting and
testing facility and will
provide developers with
planning, technical
support, and tool sets to
transition their programs to
the Merced platform.

Merced, which will
allow the same CPU to
process Windows- and
Unix-based applications,
isn’t expected until some-
time in 1999.

Microsoft
Meltdown ’98

Microsoft officially
announced the feature set
of DirectX 6 and pre-
viewed it for the first time
in early
February
with

develop-
ers at
Meltdown
’98. The
show,

which gathered together
over 900 developers rep-
resenting more than 100
software companies and
50 hardware companies
for a week in Bellevue,

WA, to test their software
and hardware with the
newest APIs on both
Windows NT 5 and
Windows 98. The first two
days are composed of
conferences that show-
case DirectX, explaining
each of the components
in detail with the last
three days set aside for
compatibility testing and
performance tuning of
code and hardware.

Microsoft outlined a
roadmap for DirectX
development with both
Windows NT and Windows
95, but wouldn’t commit
to any specific release
dates. And hoping to avoid
the mistakes that plagued
DirectX 5— such as poor

developer communication,
a lack of implementation
of advanced features,
last-minute additions, and
poor-quality driver imple-
mentation— Microsoft has
taken a cue from id
Software by declaring “the
drivers will be released
only when they are
ready.” And that, accord-
ing to DirectX Product
Manager Kevin Bacchus is
“when developers say
they are.” By laying the
groundwork early to
provide and exchange
information with develop-
ers, Microsoft hopes to
gauge the readiness of
the drivers based on their
feedback. It was hinted,
though, that the first beta
of DirectX 6 may be
released in early May to
coincide with the
Computer Game
Developer’s Conference.

DirectX 6 will be fully
implemented in both
Windows NT 5 and
Windows 98 (although the
new OS will be initially
released with DirectX 5) as
well as Windows 95. In
addition, Microsoft continu-
ally stressed that Windows
NT 5.0 will be the develop-
ment platform of choice for
both software and hard-
ware developers, and
announced that Windows
98 will be the final release
of the Windows 9X operat-
ing system and that NT 6
will make the move to the
consumer base.

Key new features of
DirectX 6 include:

• faster performance with
additional features in the
Direct3D API that include
single-pass multi-textur-
ing, bump mapping, vertex
buffers, stencil planes, and
texture compression

• greater stability, reliability,
and scalability across all
of the APIs

• the DirectMusic API,
which will allow develop-
ers to sync redbook audio
to games, play MIDI that

> 16

APR 98 boot 15

1

> 15

interacts dynamically, and
add support for customized
instruments with unlimited
total instruments (currently
limited to 1 28)

• complete integration into
Windows NT 5

• advanced DVD support via
the DirectShow API

For more on DirectX 6,
check out our preview on
page 60.

Digital, IBM To
Break 1000MHz

Speed Barrier by
the Year 2000

That 500MHz Slot 2
Deschutes or Merced
processor won’t be the
reigning speed king for long,
at least according to IBM
and Digital Equipment, who
both plan to introduce a
1000MHz microprocessor by
the year 2000.

DEC’S third-gen 21264
family Alpha will reach
1000MHz in two years,
probably maintaining its per-
formance edge over Intel’s
forthcoming Merced chip.

The 15.2 million transis-
tor chip is fabricated using a
0.35-micron, and features a
2.0-volt core. In the next few
years, the chips will be fab-
ricated using 0.25-micron
and 0.18-micron process
technology.

Other features of the
new microprocessor family
include out-of-order
instruction execution, 64K
on-chip data and instruction
caches, improved branch
prediction through intuitive
execution, and increased
bandwidth for high-speed
access to Level 2 cache and
system memory.

Following the announce-
ment that Digital would be
acquired by Compaq, many
have speculated the new
owner would either give the
Alpha family a new lease on
life by throwing its support

behind the microprocessors
and using them in high-end
servers, or would phase out
Alpha production and turn to
Intel’s forthcoming IA-64-bit
Merced chip.

The first member of
the Alpha 21264 family
is scheduled to ship in
systems by mid-1998; the
chips are now sampling
and will enter volume
production the first half
of this year, according to
Digital. Like the current
Alpha microprocessors,
the Alpha 21264 family will
run Digital Unix, OpenVMS,
and Windows NT operating
systems.

IBM meanwhile, has
come forward with a
working prototype of an
experimental CMOS proces-
sor running at 1000MHz.

Its PowerPC-platform chip
is based on the company’s
0.25-micron aluminum fab,
but should shift to IBM’s
recently announced 0.18-
micron copper process for a
projected 25% to 30%
improvement before shipping
sometime around the year
2000 as well.

Egghead Closes
Down The Coop

Egghead has announced it
will be closing all 80 of its
retail stores, affecting more
than 800 employees, in
order to shift its focus to an
Internet-only sales structure.

The company had
recently seen its third-
quarter retail sales drop
almost 13% to $99.1 M, but
its decision to abandon the
retail market was no doubt
influenced by the fact its
Internet-only sales rose
almost 500% to $11. 8M.
Said George Orban,
Egghead’s chairman and
chief executive, “The
amount of business that’s
being transacted over the
net . . . is growing far in
excess of retail growth.”

The company will also
change its operating name
from Egghead Inc. to
Egghead.com. 0

Bonded Modems
Deliver High-
Speed Access

HITTING SPEED/COST SWEET SPOTS

F rustrated with lackluster
56K connections? Don’t
want to pay the high
price for ISDN? Tired
of waiting for cable
modems? Doubling
your connection speed
really requires only two
modems, two phone lines, and a little
something called MPPP.

MPPP, or Multilink Point-to-Point
Protocol, was originally developed in
1994 to bind multiple ISDN channels
into higher-speed Internet pipes, but it
works just as well with analog modem
channels. Windows NT 4 has support-
ed MPPP for years, and the new
Windows 95 Dial-Up Networking 1.2
client released last November added
support for two bonded analog or
ISDN channels. But there’s a catch:
your ISP must support MPPP (luckily
most do), and unless your ISP allows
multiple logins by the same user ID,
you’ll also need to purchase a second
user account. You don’t need a special
modem or even modems of the same
brand. Heck, MPPP will even bond
modems of different speeds.

As a result, modem manufacturers
have begun rolling out nice, but
nonessential, “two modems in a box”
products. Forget the hardware— the
main difference is the MPPP software.

Diamond Multimedia’s Shotgun
is an alternative to DUN 1.2 that sup-
ports an extension of MPPP called
Bandwidth-On-Demand. Shotgun
doesn’t connect the second modem
until it’s needed, and disconnects it
when bandwidth demand drops (such
a feature will save money if your ISP
charges by the minute). Even better,
if you have call waiting on one line,
Shotgun gives you an on-screen alert
and the option to accept the call.

It’s been widely reported that
Shotgun works only with ISPs that
use equipment made by Ascend
Communications. Not so, according to
product-line manager Jeff Orr. “All you

lose when calling a non-Ascend switch
is Bandwidth-On-Demand,” he says.
“And in this age of flat-rate Internet
service, most people don’t need it.”

Shotgun will be distributed only
with Diamond’s SupraXpress 56
modems, including the forthcoming
$200 Suprasonic II two-in-one
model. However, other brands
and speeds can be bonded to
a SupraXpress with Shotgun.

Alternately, Boca Research’s
DynamicDuo combines two K56flex
modem chips on one ISA card.
Midcore Software’s MidPoint client
bonds the two data channels with
standard MPPP and also lets up to
five LAN users share the doubled
bandwidth. Midpoint detects call-
waiting signals and disconnects
one modem to let voice calls ring
through. However, it lacks
Bandwidth-On-Demand.

Transend Corp.’s Transend 67 is
a system more suited for corporate
remote-access applications than
consumer ISPs. The $599 dual-chip
modem uses hardware-based propri-
etary technology to bond two 33.6Kbps
channels, but the central-site server
must run the same modems.

Another solution, Interex’s $50
Web Overdrive software combines the
bandwidth of two modems without
MPPP. It speeds web surfing by down-
loading graphic files and other page
elements in parallel, but each file
moves at single-line speed. In other
words, those naughty files you’re
downloading won’t arrive any faster.

As expected, large ISPs have been
slow to accommodate bonded
modems, due to the logistics of updat-
ing their firmware and billing systems.
NetCom, Mindspring, and Concentric
Network are actively testing bonding
technologies and developing price
plans, but AOL, AT 81 T, and the
Microsoft Network have no immediate
plans for dual-modem service.

—David H aka la

16 boot APR 98

ATI XPERT@Play

STB Velocity 128 PCI

Diamond Monster 3D PCI

Hercules Stringray 128 PCI

Matrox Mystique 220 + Matrox M3D PCI

Matrox Millenium II PCI
91.7

Creative Labs Graphics Blaster PCI
72.2

powered by ATI has the winning cards. Witness the
industry's most recent awards from PC
|4 ^{|yV| Magazine, PC World, PC/Computing and
Boot, and ATI's partnership with the top
ten OEMs. ATI's ace is our award-winning
XPERT products available in both PCI or AGP Gamers go
berserk over XPERT@Play's 3D features and performance,
TV-out and video playback. Not to be outdone,
XPERT@Work delivers maximum levels of business
productivity with industry leading 2D, 3D and video
acceleration. And don't forget to add on ATI-TV ATI's
TV tuner card. Everyone loves a winner - and thati ATI.

ATI is setting the new standard in 2D and 3D
performance. Now ATI is even faster with the latest
ATI RAGE PRO drivers. Check out our website at

www.atitech.com/boot „ _ £

for information about I

AT* most recent awards. | --

; .-^T- »»• ,D - "f I ^ ATI-TV KSS

i PERFORMANCE/

3D Performance Comparison - ZD 3D Winbench '98

www.atitech.com/boot

Product Information Number 85

Professional DCS 520

HIGH-TECH TOYS
AND TOOLS WITH
THE RIGHT STUFF

Logitech Trackman Marble FX
Logitech’s patented Marble sensing technology is on
showy display in its Trackman Marble FX. With an optical track-
ing system and no mechanical moving parts, the FX provides preci-
sion, reduced wear, smooth tracking, and low maintenance. A laser-like
beam tracks dots printed on the ball and a sensor follows the motion. No
more dusting or cleaning wheels! The Trackman FX’s unique wedge-shaped
design exposes the trackball on both sides, letting you move the ball with just your
finger or with your finger and thumb for fine-detail work. And with the included
MouseWare software, you can program the four buttons to scroll and zoom, drag lock,
HyperJump, CyberJump, or any of 50 options. These smooth moves will cost you $99.95.
Logitech; 800.231.7717; www.logitech.com

Kodak Professional DCS 520 Digital Camera if you’ve outgrown the big-
glass TTL action of the Olympus D-600L, it’s time to consider some pro-caliber digital
camera action. Designed with photojournalists working in the field in mind, the
$15,000 Kodak DCS 520 is one serious camera. Beyond the burly 1728x1 168 pixel
CCD (which spews detail-rich 6MB files) and the 36-bit color depth (for image
detail so rich you can retire on it), this year’s model is based on a rugged
Canon EOS SLR camera body, compatible with the full line of inter-
changeable auto-focus lenses and capable of surviving conditions
ranging from 17 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. And forget those
interminable wait times during image write. The DCS 520
will grab up to 3.5 frames every second onto a 340MB PC
card hard drive that can be tossed into any PC card
slot for drag-and-drop image transfer. Or you can
blaze your pix ’cross the built-in IEEE 1394
high-speed serial interface. And with details
like a variable ISO of 200 to 1600, cali-
brated TTL flash, and histogram con-
trols on the camera’s built-in color
LCD that’ll render Photoshop
obsolete, this is the digital
camera you want.

Eastman Kodak;
800.235.6325;
www.kodak.com

RF-Liflk’S Wireless PC@TV Turn your living room into a computer entertain-
ment center without all the bulky or extraneous equipment. With RF-Link’s $600
PC@TV, you can surf the net, send e-mail, play games, listen to audio CDs, watch DVD-
ROM movies, even print documents— using the power of your home PC and your exist-
ing ISP. A wireless transmitter and receiver pair sends high-res color video and stereo
audio from your PC to a TV in any room of your house via 2.4GHz FM radio waves and
circular polarization that enables signals to pass through walls and floors, at a range
of up to 100 feet. And a wireless keyboard and mouse combination (activated with a

wireless/standard key-
board switch) transmits
keystrokes and commands to
your PC. Also included is Vidam

Communications’ Living Room Active software, which enhances computer images for
viewing on your TV and controls all device activity. Don’t spend money on a bigger
monitor— take advantage of the big-screen TV you already own.

RF-Link; 310.787.2328; www.rflinktech.com

When we first laid eyes on the Button Box we were impressed. It looked mighty
cool, but darn it, none of the bootBoyz or Girlz could figure out what the heck it
was supposed to do. Well guess what? It's a Button Box— and it controls things.
DUH! Put simply, the $749 Button Box can be the master of your domain. Ws fully
programmable and provides a powerful interface that allows you to easily direct
and coordinate a staggering array of electronic devices from the comfort of a cen-
ter seat. DVD? Check. Sony monitor? You betcha! Proximity Detector? Oh yeah!
Airport telephone dialers? Yes! Theme-park shows and rides? Why not! The unit
can be programmed to handle just about any device (application software that can
be modified and downloaded into the unit is included), and you can even arrange a
specific sequence of events to occur when a certain button is pressed. Very kewl.
Oh yeah , the buttons aren’t included.

Entertainment Technologies Interactive Studios; 407.370.9000; www.et-studios.com

Smart Media Reader/Writer

Don’t you just hate it when you’ve filled your digital camera to capacity, only to
realize you don’t have a quick and dirty way to offload the pix? We certainly do!
With Hagiwara Sys-Com’s new Digital Through Smart Media Reader/Writer, now
you don’t! Not only is it versatile (supporting both 5v and 3.3v Smart Media), it’s
also fast (with a 5KB/sec transfer rate) and extremely handy to tote (the entire unit
weighs only 5.4 ounces and fits nicely into the palm of your hand).

Better yet, this $90 digital device comes in three
tasty flavors: an external unit that includes an
easy-to-install ISA-based interface
board, and two internal models that
can be mounted for either front
(utilizing a free drive bay) or
rear access. An optional PC
card adapter is also available.

Hagiwara Sys-Com;

800.359.7267; www.hscus.com

Nintendo Multimedia Wireless
Headphone System

Between our web goth’s ominous
industrial screeching and our news
editor’s bizarre Canadian folk
music, headphones are a must in
the boot offices. But who wants a
cord tethering his head to the PC’s
CD-ROM drive? Check these wire-
less headphones. Just park the IR
transmitter on a perch for maximum
range and roam up to 25 feet with
digital quality sound. Twin IR sensors on
both sides keep you tuned in as long as
you’re in the line of sight of the transmit-
ter. And an auto-mute circuit saves you
from annoying static when you wander too far
away from home base. Priced at $50, these com-
fortable, retro-styled headphones work.

Lara I Group; 888.293.3332; www.laral.com/

Qualcomm Q Phone Take your StarTac and go home to
mommy, little boy. This is the age of PCS, and the 1900MHz
Qualcomm Q Phone is the weapon of choice. Weighing in at under
6 ounces, the clam-shell-designed Q
Phone is smaller than a PalmPilot
PDA and fits in the palm of your
hand. But don’t worry about making
sacrifices for the pocketable form-
factor, this is no-compromise gear.

The CDMA digital technology allows
whisper clear conversation, and
the built-in encoding protects your
conversations and phone number
from prying scanners. The Li-On
battery delivers up to 30 hours of
standby time and up to 2 hours of
conversation (plus a second bat-
tery parks it in the charger base for
handy swaps). Then the Q Phone
goes the extra mile and serves as
an alphanumeric pager that can
receive Internet-based services
ranging from stock quotes to air-
line schedules to e-mail. The Q
Phone can even be set to silent
vibrating ring mode, for pocket
pleasure.

Qualcomm; 800.349.4188;
www.qualcomm.com

WOULD THE WORLD’S
LARGEST CHIP MAKER
SETTLE FOR SECOND RATE
3D GRAPHICS?

There’s a certain company in Silicon Valley famous
for advancing the capabilities of the PC platform with
the industry’s best microprocessors. In fact, it’s far
and away the world leader. They stake their business
and reputation on the quality of the technology they
put “inside” (so to speak ) the PC. Naturally, when this
company decided to develop a graphics chip, it’s no
surprise they partnered with Real 3D to help take
graphics performance on the PC to a new level. Will
you see a dramatic change in the graphics quality
and capability of your computer? You bet. And faster
than you might imagine.

m

Product Information Number 117

REAL 3D and the Real 3D logo are registered trademarks of Real 3D, Inc.

1-800-393-7730 » www.real3d.com

MICROSOFT DEFECTOR TELLS ALL

I ’d like to address all the Microsoft
haters out there who think
Microsoft’s power is a bad thing,
-but don’t know what to do about it.

The first thing an effective
Microsoft Anarchist needs to learn
is what actually makes Microsoft
strong and what makes it weak.
You’ll have to give up some firmly held and
cherished delusions about what makes the
Empire work.

Delusion #1 : Microsoft ruthlessly crushes
competitors with a host of unfair business
strategies, including shutting them out of
the market, deliberately breaking support
for their products, swamping a problem
with resources, and so forth.

Actually, this perception often defeats a
competitor long before Bill gets his hands
on it. In my years at Microsoft, most “com-
petitive threats” Microsoft mobilized
against were dead long before Microsoft
laid a glove on them. Usually a handful of
people waving Microsoft business cards
and shouting “BOO!” were enough to send
a competitor spiraling into oblivion.
Delusion #2: Microsoft is a behemoth that
marches along consuming and destroying

stayed focused. Companies with cool heads
can take turf from Microsoft.

Delusion #3: Microsoft wants no competition.

Competition is the fuel that feeds Bill’s
fire. Without a major competitor, Microsoft
loses its own focus and slows to a crawl.
Contrary to popular perception, Sun’s,
Oracle’s, and Netscape’s ongoing duels with
Microsoft are actually good for all compa-
nies involved. While the battle is high-pro-
file, everybody’s stock soars and nobody has
to bum a lot of cash buying advertising. It’s
like a prize fight, where even the loser takes
home a few million dollars. Unix worksta-
tions, databases, and proprietary commerce
servers aren’t exciting news to the masses
who buy products and stock. Java, network
computers, and browser wars draw an audi-
ence. Publicly kicking Bill in the nuts is a
very profitable. If you think you’re helping
to beat Microsoft by supporting Java, buying
a network computer, or using a Netscape
browser, you’re mistaken. You’re just buy-
ing seats for Microsoft’s show.

Delusion #4: There’s very little an individ-
ual can do about it. This is a job for a big
company or the government to fix.

Rarely has another major company or

and yet some of the most
important aspects of media
involve sex and violence, two
businesses Microsoft dares not
touch lest they jeopardize its
cash flow.

Microsoft can’t innovate; it
must buy its best new ideas.
Compression technologies, 3D
engines, set-top boxes,
Softimage, Altimira Composer,
PowerPoint, Money, and of
course all Microsoft games are
developed externally. Despite
the perception, Microsoft
R&D's greatest contribution is
the smarmy paperclip in Word.

Microsoft moves like a
barge. Most competitors blow it
when they think Microsoft is
going to eat them for lunch and
lose focus. The most serious
competitors were often small
products Microsoft didn’t even
notice until too late and then was
forced to buy a solution.

mm \

ALEX ST. JOHN From his
position as Microsoft's game
technology evangelist, Alex St.
John was responsible for the
controversial DirectX APIs that
have either taken PC gaming to
the next level or were horribly
broken, depending on your point
of view.

The Microsoft Anarchists’ Cookbook

TOPPLING THE EVIL EMPIRE IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP. . .IF YOU KNOW THE SECRETS

everything it encounters.

The truth is that Microsoft is rarely
effective at displacing a good competitor.
Adobe, EA, and Intuit all thrived despite
Microsoft’s most aggressive efforts. The
people who make great technologies are
rarely the same people who know how to
handle real competition when it comes.
The minute they per-
ceive a threat, they
change what was origi-
nally a focused formula
to cope with some per-
ceived threat that often
never arrives. The sim-
ple act of changing a working thing is usu-
ally enough to destroy it. SGI, Borland,
Novell, and Lotus had a winning edge but
blew it by hallucinating. The only spit left
in Bill’s eye from Apple is QuickTime.

Microsoft is only effective in two key
markets: operating systems and office soft-
ware. Everything else is acquired, losing
money, or running second at best. I’ve
never seen Microsoft beat a competitor that

the government destroyed a monopoly. The
usual causes are major economic move-
ments, innovations, or loss of leadership.
Nobody will take away Microsoft’s busi-
ness. Somebody — some individual or small
group of people will have an idea that rede-
fines computing in such a way that
Microsoft remains big, yet becomes irrele-

vant. IBM is still the largest software com-
pany in the world, it still has five to six
times as many employees as Microsoft, and
it still controls a vast empire. Yet some-
where along the way it lost its “monopoly”
status because something changed in com-
puting, and IBM missed it.

There are places big companies just
can’t go. Contemplate this:

Bill wants to make a media empire,

Oh yes, consumers. As PCs proliferate,
the demand for them to become more
reliable and easier to use will grow dramati-
cally. This need conflicts directly with
Microsoft’s need to make ever bigger, more
complex OSes and office products to justify
prices and upgrade fees. And consider
Microsoft’s ignorance about who an aver-

age consumer is and what he needs. People
more in touch with the real world will
make products that serve normal people
better, without complexity. When that hap-
pens, just as happened with IBM, Microsoft
will not collapse but merely cease to be rel-
evant. These ideas won’t come from Sun,
Netscape, or Oracle, who are just as clue-
less about simplicity as Bill is.

They will come from you. 0

If you think you’re helping to beat Microsoft by supporting Java,
buying a network computer, or using a Netscape browser,
you’re mistaken, You’re just buying seats for Microsoft’s show.

APR 98 boot

21

in m

mm,

MAOMgS
Win Nor
%

FfteNpiy

am mmw '"'•

Immerse yourself in seven unbelievable fantasy worlds and anything organic. Through IB punishing levels, and an end-
take on a marrauding metallic battalion of mechanized death less barrage of spectacular enplosive firepower and amazing
machines with your weapon-packed, futuristic assault uehi- lighting effects, gou must track the Shadow master down and
cle. The Shadow master, an evil overlord, has gone complete- make scrap metal of him and his lethal robotic creatures.
Ig mad, and he will stop at nothing less than total genocide of Shad ouj Master, the ultimate fantasy shooter .

Product Information Number 279

PlayStation

PSYGNOSIS

THE SCOOP FROM A MAJOR PLAYER

ine-tenths of everything
is crap.

This maxim,
coined by author
Theodore Sturgeon,
applies to everything:
literature, movies,
politicians, doctors,
game reviewers, and so on. So it follows
that in any business, computer gaming
for instance, one product out of every
ten is good, and the rest barely toe the
line. Thus, the fact that there never
seems to be a wealth of worthwhile
games is understandable and logical.

Think about the titles that truly
stood out last year. Of the 3,111 entertain-
ment titles published in 1997 (according
to PC Data), were there 300 really good
ones? Not even close. We’d be lucky
if that, number were thirty. That’s 1%,
not 10%.

The question that should smack you
over the head right about now is: What
about the other 3,081? Last year publish-
ers spent money ( lots of money), time,
and effort to develop 3,081 titles ranging
from mediocre to garbage. This landfill

while the others enter an evolutionary
cul-de-sac and vanish.

One might assume from this that
those 3,081 games should just go away.
The good news is, many of them will.
The bad news is, it takes a lot of time.

The entire entertainment industry
thrives on Sturgeon’s Law. In most
other businesses, companies creating
inferior products would be slaughtered.
However, the nature of creative indus-
tries and the diversity of consumer
tastes (or lack thereof) mean some suck-
er will pay to see Police Academy XV, or
to play Streets of SimCity. If the enter-
tainment business was in the wild, it
would have been lapped on the evolu-
tionary track by the tree sloth. This
means that somehow, somewhere, as
long as there are PCs, there will be an
Island Peril, an Assassin 2015, and a
Soldier Boyz.

This simple theoretical inevitability
still doesn’t answer the single burning
question that drives anyone who surveys
computer games: Why do people continue
to make bad games?

The various answers to this question

Designer William Volk
explores some of these points
in an article called “Why Can’t
Johnny Ship?” for the online
developer ’zine Gamasutra
(www.gamasutra.com). In it,
he makes a pertinent analogy.

When Boeing was developing
and building the 777, they
didn’t keep changing the
design as they went along to
allow for new technology. They
did all the planning ahead of
time, locked down the design,
and then made the plane.

The space shuttle is anoth-
er example: much of the tech-
nology is essentially vintage
1970s. Your desktop PC has
more power than many of the
systems on the shuttle.

NASA realized (in some
areas a little too late) that chas-
ing technology was a race that
would inevitably be lost, so they planned
for it and around it.

T. LIAM MCDONALD is
the all-knowing god of
gaming. His mother still
can’t believe that he plays
games for a living.

The Fall of PC Gaming, Volume

THE LAWS OF EVOLUTION AFFECT COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT

consumed thousands of man-hours of
labor, precious natural resources (fossil
fuels, trees, water, Twinkies), the hard-
earned dollars of consumers, and a
large amount of investment capital.

So why don’t they just make 30
good games instead of dumping the
3,081 bad ones on us? Following
Sturgeon’s Law, if
publishers released
30 games, we’d only
have three good
ones. And if we use
their actual perfor-
mance as a gauge,
we wouldn’t even see one complete
game worth a damn.

Here’s where Sturgeon’s Law runs
smack into the wall of natural selection,
which states that species will struggle
for finite resources to survive, and
species must adapt and develop varia-
tions that they in turn pass on to their
progeny. The species that adapt survive,

could be used to reform the game-devel-
opment process. That is, if we had
answers. Regardless of the game’s
genre, the fundamental problem facing
every nascent game developer is the
same: rapidly evolving technology has
not caught up to the methods of pro-
duction. We’re still learning how to

In my next column, I’m going to
look at the core issues that drive the
quality of games down and result in
buggy, unstable, technically inferior,
badly running, and just plan un-enter-
taining games. As an example, I’ll look
at four games released last year that got
pretty much everything right (Seven

The nature of creative industries and the diversity of

consumer tastes (or lack thereof) mean some sucker

pay to see Police Academy VX, or to play Streets of SimCity.

use all the new tools being created
every day, and future tools must be
counted into the equation. The goal
post is constantly moving farther down-
field. Poor initial planning and limited
vision leave programmers chasing a
moving target, which they can never
catch, unless they learn to anticipate
and prepare for it.

Kingdoms, Curse of Monkey Island, Jedi
Knight, and Longbow II) and four cre-
ative failures ( Conquest Earth, Blade
Runner, Descent to Undermountain, and
Red Baron II).

Maybe then we’ll be able to answer
the cousin to Volk’s question, “Why,
when Johnny finally does ship, is his
product so bad?” 0

APR 98 boot 23

©1998 Ripcord Games. © 1998 WaveQuest. Inc. Terra Vidus is a trademark of WaveQuest,
Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
Distributed by Panasonic Ko^dfcring information please call (888) 797-5867.

Gficord

INVESTIGATING INTERNET ISSUES

THE LINE

hat Sun’s CEO Scott
McNealy doesn’t get
is that he’s already
“got it” and should
shut up, for once.
Like the kid with
the best bike on the
block, he needs to
be known for his prized possession. So,
invariably, someone comes up with some-
thing better . . .

But McNealy’s bike wasn’t always so
shiny.

Early Java apps sucked, although that
wasn’t entirely the fault of the Java devel-
opment team at Sun. It was more about
ineffective programming (see boot 04)
than weak design methodology, as so
many critics shouted. Few programmers
understood the architecture’s paradigm
shifts. This ultimately rendered those
ancestral apps bulky and slow.

This also collided with unforeseen
browser features that went on to manifest
scads of security issues, such as cookies that
leak privacy and produce financial-transac-
tion hell. But who could’ve anticipated these
“features,” let alone the standards path of

not only because it is a capable program-
ming language, but because it’s actually a
good one. Yes, Java is a good language.
And it proves this everyday, as it leaves
behind those little web games and anima-
tions to tackle hardcore enterprise markets.

The road to enterprise has not been
easy, partly because the enterprise market
must be more than conservative — it needs
to be dead sure. Wall Street, the jury on
such multibillion-dollar matters, has had a
field day ridiculing Java’s inadequacies
(though it’s difficult to say there’s been even
one thorough, let alone conclusive, investi-
gation into the technology). More important-
ly, the establishment has gone wild ridicul-
ing Scott McNealy and his outlandish I-am-
king manifestos, bumbling Bill Gates jokes,
and in general dislikable personality.

Despite its reputation and McNealy’s
daily blunders, a slew of recent announce-
ments suggest Java is ready to come out of
the closet, proud and strong.

IBM and Lotus have teamed on the
Lotus eSuite Workplace, the first complete
Java-based productivity solution with access
to e-mail, the web, and a set of compact biz
apps. Desktop equals enterprise.

WITH SHEL KIMEN

client/server enterprise resource-
planning applications in Java,
which include financial, human
resources, distribution, manufac-
turing, and sales modules.

Oracle equals enterprise.

And tech companies aren’t
the only ones hot for Java.

Ralston Purina completed a
Java-based manufacturing appli-
cation this year. Multibillion-
dollar Home Depot is using
Java for inventory tracking and
human-resource management,
and as a virtual office for off-
site managers. Sabre
Technology (the online travel
and flight scheduling and pur-
chasing baron) also plans to
port its Qik-Access software to
Java; its goal is to make the
move to a “thin client” net-
worked computer system. And this is just
the beginning of an increasingly long list.

Successful companies such as Lotus,
Ralston Purina,

SHEL KIMEN is traveling the world
(real time, not virtually), so e-mail
response may be slower. But as
always, try her at kimen@well.com.

Java: Too Legit to Quit

SCOTT MCNEALY’S GOLDEN CHILD COMES OF AGE... DESIPTE HIS EFFORTS

browser-to-server-to-database interactions
back in the early 90s, when Java was in the
test tube?

Still, Sun should fess up to a few prob-
lems. Changes in Java between versions 1.0
and 1.1 wreaked scores of backward-compati-
bility issues. And a
technology that alleged-
ly runs across any plat-
form still blows chunks
on any 16-bit operating
system — which repre-
sents almost a third of
the machines on desktops today.

Despite these early glitches, Java per-
sisted. Maybe it was because the Java con-
cept birthed a brilliant marketing strategy,
the first and only successful marketing
strategy Sun ever accomplished. Maybe it
was because Microsoft-domination fears
swelled to unexpected proportions and
developers clambered desperately for any
alternative solution.

But could it be that Java actually
had/has the potential to reinvent software

Versant Object Technology (specializing
in object database software used to model
complex systems and processes) announced
new tools and partners intended to inte-
grate Java client apps with its database soft-
ware. Database equals enterprise.

and Home Depot
don’t toy with
new technologies
and standards
issues because of
cleverly hyped
marketing strate-
gies or bandwag-
on ballyhoo. And they certainly don’t spend
billions on techno-philosophical re-orgs
because they’re threatened by Microsoft
domination, (despite Mr. Gates’s outspoken
fears of just this).

Clearly these are issues of customer de-

Despite some early glitches, Java persisted, partly because the Java
concept birthed a brilliant marketing strategy, the first and only
successful marketing strategy Sun ever accomplished,

Extensity, a fresh start-up, will launch
the first “100% Pure Java” application to
automate corporate travel-expense report-
ing. Those with expense accounts know
this is a big part of daily corporate opera-
tions. Operations equals enterprise.

DCC Technology Management Group (off-
spring of $7.7 billion manufacturing corpo-
ration, Dana) will release a Java version of
its Wyzdom asset-management program.
Asset-management equals enterprise.

Oracle announced it will recast its

mands and increasing dependency on the
Internet and the technologies that work well
with the Internet — technologies such as Java.

But the fumbles that could cost the
game are McNealy’s endless tirades against
Bill Gates and Sun's Microsoft-esque quest
to control Java (with the 100% Pure Java
initiative). If Sun could just realize it has
the shiniest bike on the block and focus its
energy on keeping its prized property pol-
ished, there isn’t a lot anyone else can do to
stop the momentum. 0

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FROM THE MAKERS OF PARTITION MAGIC®

Product Information Number 281

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TOMORROW'S TECHNOLOGIES EXPLAINED

I ntel and Hewlett-Packard

unveiled their IA-64 chip archi-
tecture last fall, and I expected a
flood of mainstream press cover-
age. Why not? After years of wal-
lowing in near obscurity, the
computer industry has become
the darling of the mass media.
Arcane stories about CPU bugs and oper-
ating-system wars are now routine fodder
for daily newspapers and TV talk shows.

But for the most part, the main-
stream media missed the IA-64 story.
(Even stranger, so did many computer
magazines.) Then I realized why:
Harried journalists have trouble focus-
ing on something that’s still two years
away. Also, the initial information about
IA-64 was so technical that most people
didn’t know what to make of it.

Yet another factor is that Intel and
HP are keeping crucial details about
their next-generation architecture under
wraps. Never have I seen such high
walls of secrecy around a new project.

Why are they so paranoid? Perhaps
they realize better than anybody else how
much is riding on IA-64. It’s not just a
Pentium III or Pentium IV. It’s not an

Sega said when they moved from 8-bit to
16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit consoles. But the
64-bit aspect of IA-64 isn’t the central
story. Intel could have stretched the 32-bit
x86 to 64 bits without changing the
architecture as radically as IA-64 does.
Besides, there’s nothing new about 64-bit
processors. They’ve been around for
years — you can buy them from Digital,
IBM, Sun, SGI/Mips, and just about
everyone else. Heck, you can nab a 64-bit
game console for $150 at Toys ’R’ Us.

No, the big news about IA-64 is how
it looks forward to an era when a single
chip will contain hundreds of millions
of transistors, not just a few million
transistors like today. The vast transistor
budgets of the early 21st century will
pose a challenge to CPU architects: Can
they use those resources to build highly
parallel processors? Or will they merely
resort to dumping the transistors into
larger on-chip caches?

Not that there’s anything wrong with
large on-chip caches. By temporarily stor-
ing more data close to the core, caches
help keep fast CPUs from outrunning
the computer’s slower memory. Ideally,
though, engineers would spend those

The Ultimate Poker Chip

than the Klamath-series
Pentium II. But that’s only
because they run at higher fre-
quencies — both types of chips
have three integer pipelines.

Adding a fourth pipeline
should theoretically boost per-
formance by 33%, but it actual-
ly wouldn’t. The Pentium II
already has trouble keeping
three pipelines busy.

Today’s widest superscalar
CPUs can process only four or
five instructions at once.

Wider designs are possible,
but the payoff isn’t there. The
additional pipelines would be
idle most of the time because
the rest of the system (particu-
larly RAM) can’t keep them
fed with instructions and data.

So engineers are spending
their growing transistor bud-
gets on larger caches, which
help keep the pipes flowing and are
easier to design. What they really want
to do, though, is add more pipelines.

IA-64 tries to
attack this problem
head-on. First, it rede-
fines the instruction
format to pack multi-

l

TOM HALFHILL is a senior
editor at Byte magazine and the
author of two computing books.
He first became interested in
computers during the disco era.

INTEL'S IA-64 PROMISES TO REDEFINE THE CPU AS WE KNOW IT

instruction-set extension like MMX. It’s
not even a linear evolutionary step like
the 386’s transition from 16 bits to 32 bits.

Nope, IA-64 is a whole new architec-
ture. It will have provisions for back-
ward compatibility with x86 software,
but the 64-bit core of the CPU will trash
the x86’s 20-year-old
baggage. Although it
doesn’t introduce any
startling new technolo-
gies that haven’t been
tried before, no other
processor unites all of
IA-64’s technologies in a single architec-
ture. IA-64 will require new 64-bit oper-
ating systems, new optimized compil-
ers, and new application software.

In other words, it’s a major gamble.

When the mainstream media get
around to digesting this story in 1999,
chances are they’ll focus on the 64-bit
angle. Hey, aren’t twice as many bits
twice as good? That’s what Nintendo and

transistors designing better logic circuits
that execute more instructions per clock
cycle. A large cache is like a bank account
that stores your money where you can get
it; better logic is like a raise that pays you
more money in the first place.

Modern CPUs boost their processing

pie instructions into a
single bundle. Second,
it requires the compil-
er to put those instructions in the most
efficient order while the program is being
written, rather than expecting the CPU
to do it while the program is running.
Third, when a program reaches a branch,
the CPU can execute instructions for
both possible outcomes before the user

IA-64 will require new 64-bit operating systems, new

optimized compilers, and new application software. In other
words, it s a major gamble

power with parallel pipelines that exe-
cute multiple instructions at the same
time. Unfortunately, CPUs are hitting
a wall with this superscalar approach.
Most of the recent performance gains
are coming from higher clock speeds,
not more pipelines.

For example, the new Deschutes-
series Pentium II chips will eventually
deliver at least 50% more performance

even decides which way to go; then
discards the results for the path not cho-
sen. Fourth, the CPU can load data from
memory well before the program needs it
and even prevent crashes if the data isn’t
valid.

Clean breaks are never easy, and
they’re often prone to failure. IA-64 is a
true break with the past. Intel is taking a
bigger step than most people realize. Q

APR 98 boot 27

DELL DIMENSION DESKTOPS

Common features: ♦ Mini-Tower Model ♦ 512KB Integrated L2 Cache ♦ 56K Capable** U.S. Robotics x2 WinModem ♦ 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive ♦ 2 Universal Serial Bus (USB) Ports
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DELL DIMENSION XPS D300
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» 64MB SDRAM Memory

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• A/EW1600HS 21“ (19.8" v.i.s., .26dp)
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• 32X Max A Variable CD-ROM Drive

• Integrated Yamaha Wavetable Sound

• Altec ACS-495 Full Dolby Surround
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• Iomega Zip 100MB Internal Drive

• Microsoft Home Essentials 98

• Dell® Quietkey® Keyboard

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• 8.4GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive (9.5ms)

• 1200HS 19" (17.9" v.i.s., .26dp) Monitor

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• 2X DVD-ROM Drive and Decoder Card

• NEW Turtle Beach Montego A3D
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• Altec ACS-495 Full Dolby Surround
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• Altec ACS-295 Speakers with Subwoofer

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OPEN ALL NIGHl

DELL INSPIRON™ 3000 NOTEBOOKS

Common features: ♦ Modular Options Bay accepts 24X Max 00 Variable CD-ROM, 3.5" Floppy Drive (both included), or Optional 2nd Li-Ion Battery ♦ 512KB L2
Pipeline Burst Cache ♦ Stereo Speakers with 3D Surround Sound and Yamaha Software Wavetable ♦ Zoom Video and USB Ports ♦ Smart Lithium Ion Battery
♦ Cardbus Ready/Fast IR1.1 ♦ Microsoft Windows 95 ♦ Microsoft Internet Explorer ♦ Touchpad ♦ Extendable 1 Year Limited Warranty 1

DELL INSPIRON 3000 M266XT
266MHz PENTIUM PROCESSOR

WITH MMX TECHNOLOGY

DELL INSPIRON 3000 M266XT
266MHz PENTIUM PROCESSOR

WITH MMX TECHNOLOGY

DELL INSPIRON 3000 M233ST
233MHz PENTIUM PROCESSOR

WITH MMX TECHNOLOGY

DELL INSPIRON 3000 M200ST
200MHz PENTIUM PROCESSOR

WITH MMX TECHNOLOGY

• 13.3" XGA Active Matrix TFT Display

• 144MB SDRAM Memory

• 4GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive

• 128-bit Graphics Accelerator with
65K Colors at 1024x768

• Leather Carrying Case

• MS® Office 97 Small Business Edition

• 6.9 Pounds*

• 56 K Capable** x2 Modem, add $149.

• Inspiron Port Replicator, add $159.

• 2nd Lithium Ion Battery, add $169.

• 13.3" XGA Active Matrix TFT Display

• 64MB SDRAM Memory

• 4GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive

• 128-bit Graphics Accelerator with
65K Colors at 1024x768

• MS Office 97 Small Business Edition

• 6.9 Pounds*

• Upgrade to 96MB SDRAM, add $199.

• 56K Capable** x2 Modem, add $149.

• 2nd Lithium Ion Battery, add $169.

• Leather Carrying Case, add $99.

• 12.1" SVGA Active Matrix TFT Display

• 48MB SDRAM Memory

• 3.2GB ATA Hard Drive

• 128-bit Graphics Accelerator with
16 Million Colors at 800x600

• MS Office 97 Small Business Edition

• 6.4 Pounds*

• Upgrade to a 13.3" XGA Active Matrix
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• Upgrade to 64MB SDRAM, add $99.

• Upgrade to a 4GB Ultra ATA Hard
Drive, add $99.

• 12.1" SVGA Active Matrix TFT Display

• 32MB SDRAM Memory

• 3.2GB ATA Hard Drive

• 128-bit Graphics Accelerator with
16 Million Colors at 800x600

• MS Home Essentials 98

• 6.4 Pounds*

• Upgrade to a 233MHz Pentium
Processor, add $200.

• 56 K Capable** x2 Modem, add $149.

• Deluxe Nylon Carrying Case, add $69.

$3599

$2999

$2499

$2199

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pentium®!!

Pricing is not discountable. tFor a complete copy of our Guarantees or Umited Warranties, please write Dell
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certain remote areas. °°24X Max/lOX Min. A 32X Max/14X Min. “x2 products are capable of 56Kbps
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and specifications valid in the U.S. only and subject to change without notice. The Intel Inside logo and
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SOFTWARE

DESCRIPTIONS

♦ McAfee VirusScan ♦ Microsoft® Windows® 95 ♦ Microsoft Internet Explorer ♦ Microsoft IntelliMouse®

DELL DIMENSION XPS D300
300MHz PENTIUM II PROCESSOR

FEATURING MMX TECHNOLOGY

DELL DIMENSION XPS D266
266MHz PENTIUM II PROCESSOR

FEATURING MMX TECHNOLOGY

DELL DIMENSION XPS D233
233MHz PENTIUM II PROCESSOR

FEATURING MMX TECHNOLOGY

• 64MB SDRAM Memory

> 64MB SDRAM Memory

• 6.4GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive (9.5ms)

• 1 000TX 1 7" (1 5.9" v.i.s.) Trinitron Monitor

• STB nVidia 4MB 3D AGP Video Card

• 32X Max A Variable CD-ROM Drive

• A/EUVTurtle Beach Montego A3D
64 Voice Sound Card

• Altec ACS-295 Speakers with Subwoofer

• Iomega Zip 100MB Internal Drive

• Microsoft Office 97 Small Business
Edition plus Encarta 98

• Dell Quietkey Keyboard

$2499

Personal Lease 0 : $121/Mo„ 24 Mos.

Order Code #500310

• 6.4GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive (9.5ms)

• 1000TX 17" (15.9" v.i.s.) Trinitron Monitor

• STB nVidia 4MB 3D AGP Video Card

• 32X Max A Variable CD-ROM Drive

• Integrated Yamaha Wavetable Sound

• Altec ACS-295 Speakers with Subwoofer

• Microsoft Home Essentials 98 with
Money 98

• Dell Quietkey Keyboard

• Upgrade to ACS-495 Full Dolby
Surround Sound Speakers with
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fKeycode #88136]

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK MADEO

t/interview

7 expect our fill rate with Riva4 >

David Kirk isn't worried L He ,
they’re faster and more powe
they outnumber the oppositioi
It’s obvious Kirk likes his job,
as “making sure we kick the ,
all the competition. ”

Is that utility something you recom-
mended to Diamond or STB?

Absolutely. And in fact, there are a lot
of things besides the auto mip-mapping
people want to set, such as gamma.

Back to the point, does this low-res
technique skew the Riva’s benchmark results?

Certainly, if you’re moving to low-res
mip-mapped levels you’re pulling fewer
textures across the system bus. And that ;
has an effect. But it’s not as big as the ||
CPU dependence and it becomes smaller
as you move toward 2x and 4x AGP.

Do you personally think boot’s criticism
of the Riva’s visual quality was unduly harsh?

Well ... I believe you’ve been a little
harsh, but clearly there are noticeable
dithering artifacts with the Riva 128. But
we’re going to be releasing our first major
software rev beyond the initial release. And
as you know from your reviewing experi-
ences, our OEMs have not updated their f J
software release since the initial shipment.
Through the course of a lot of application
game testing, we’ve gone and fixed a lot of
the bugs you noted and increased our D3D
performance by about 50%.

So you acknowledge visual defects
with the Riva 128?

Absolutely, Every graphics chip has
some weaknesses. The essence of provid-
ing a good product is making trade-offs.

What kind of trade-offs?

We had to choose some approxima-
tions in order to make things fast. We
simplified the texturing pipeline. We do not
do per-pixel mip-mapping with the Riva 128,
but we did run a bunch of tests of what I
will call poor-quality per-pixel mip-mapping-
versus veiy careful propelling on mip-
mapping with subdivision of the polygons,
if the mip-map variation is too extreme.

And we found many cases where per-pixel. jj

Let’s get straight to it Is it true the
Riva 128 often uses a low-res mip level from
the card’s local memory, leaving the “correct’
one sitting in main memory?

No, because the mip-map level
that’s used per polygon is calculated and
the result of that calculation is the level
used — and it doesn’t have any way of
determining whether it’s local or not. So
it uses the one calculated to be correct.

Does a lower-res mip-map level some-
times get used? Yes. But how do you
decide which is the right level? We try to
make the best choice, but it has nothing
to do with where the mip-map level is
stored currently or whether it’s in cache.

Should the generation of mip levels be
left in the hands of software developers?

Developers should have a choice.

If they want to generate their own mip-
map levels, they should do that. If they’d
rather have us do it, that’s a service we
can provide.

But why doesn’t the Riva include a
utility to turn off the auto mip-mapping
feature?

Auto mip-mapping can be turned off.
There’s a nice freeware control panel that
lets you tweak all our Registry settings.

Why not include this utility in your
software driver?

We provide it to the developers who
ask, and we’ll be providing it with our
SDK the next time around. We don’t
actually produce a control panel because
we sell through Diamond and STB, who
provide their own control panels.

“I believe boot’s
been a little harsh,
but clearly there are
noticeable dithering
artifacts with the
Riva 128. Every
graphics chip has
some weaknesses.
The essence of
providing a good
product is making
trade-offs. ”

k

mip-mapping didn’t make the picture look
better; it just made it look different.

Look at a graphics vendor — and I won’t
mention any names — who does per-pixel
mip-mapping, but doesn’t do a good job
of choosing which mip-map per pixel and
doesn’t blend smoothly from one mip-map
to the next. In a game such as Moto Racer,
you're moving from near to far and you see
mip-map-level transitions. You see this line

from one mip-map to another, and it’s
jagged and screwed-up because of the poor
choice. If you look at the same game with
the Riva 128, you don’t see that problem
because it’s broken up — the transitions
happen at the polygon boundaries, which
are texture boundaries anyway. So you see a
different texture with a different mip-map
level. And that’s a particular case where die
per-polygon mip-mapping happens to look
better.

I’m not saying per-pixel mip-mapping
is bad. I think if you’re very careful, it can
look much better than per-polygon mip-
mapping, but I don’t think we’ve seen
many examples of that yet. You’ll see that
with our next product.
boot What other trade-offs have you made?
Kirk We chose our precision very carefully
to make sure we could hit our target poly-
gon rates and fill rates: 100 megapixels per
second.

Kirk I don’t see any difference between
the Voodoo and the Voodoo 2 except that
Voodoo 2 is faster and does multiple
textures. The biggest issue with the original
Voodoo was performance. The Voodoo 2
addresses that, but at a higher cost, which
really takes it out of the mainstream market.

With our second release of drivers, the
Riva 128’s performance is going to be in the
ballpark of Voodoo 2, for $100 less, plus you

get integrated
2D/3D. So
3Dfx just
didn’t really
add anything compelling to Voodoo 2. It
didn’t improve the texturing quality, and
that’s its biggest weakness.
boot How difficult is it to integrate 2D?

Kirk It’s not rocket science, but you have to
do it right. You have to pass all of the WHQL
tests, you have to do VGA correctly. If you do
it 99.99% correct, with just a few problems,
that’s the same as not doing it at all. And no
PC vendor can sell your chip.
boot What one thing do people do wrong all
the time?

Kirk VGA is not a documented standard,
but a legacy functionality. You have to
reproduce the legacy VGA, bugs and all.

And that’s something people often have to
learn by trial and error.
boot What is more important: a rich feature set
or sheer speed?

Kirk Features are important, but different
features have different levels of importance.
The most important thing for 3D gaming is

processor. But the reverse of processor
dependence is having headroom in the
hardware. If the processor gets faster and
you don’t get any faster — that’s not good.

boot Exactly what kind of scalability does the
Riva have?

Kirk We scale linearly with processor
speed. So if you go from a 300MHz
Pentium II to a 450MHz, we’re roughly
50% faster. And it’s a pretty constant
scaling with resolution. By the time this
is out, we’ll have a second major release
of software drivers that have substantial
performance tuning and a lot of bug fixes.
And with these new drivers, most games
can switch from 640x480 to 800x600 and
the frame rate doesn’t change. We’ve done
a lot of work to make sure there aren’t
synchronization problems between the
graphics and the CPU.
boot What resolution would you like to see
games run in 1998?

Kirk It’s time to move on from 640x480.
Developers should assume people are going
to play games at 800x600 and expect
people who buy high-performance cards to
play at 1024x768 or higher. I wouldn’t go to
1280x1152 yet, but 800x600 or 1024x768 are
both very reasonable resolutions to expect
throughout 1998.

boot How do you feel about AGP? Has Intel
done a good job with it?

Kirk Intel’s made a good start, but it has
been reluctant to promote AGP too much
until it’s able to transition its AGP-capable
bridge chips in volume. Intel made a mistake

< will be in the ballpark of two Voodoo 2s with SLI. ”

“It’s to Intel’s advantage to make the world very complicated in order to defend itself against other

One problem is banding in some titles
because we don’t have infinite precision
for all our shading calculations. That’s not
unique to the Riva 128. You see banding in
other cards, but if we had forever to tune, we
could have picked the exact number of bits to
use for every calculation, so you wouldn’t see
it anywhere. But we had to make choices.

The biggest compromise we had to make
was for time. We had to stop fooling with it
and get it out.

boot Were the compromises worth it?

Kirk They allowed us to finish the chip in
time. We were able to ramp-up and supply
Dell, Micron, and Gateway with a large
number of chips this fall.

boot How does the visual quality of the current
Riva chipset compare to the current Voodoo
chipset?

Kirk I think it has different visual quality. I
believe the Voodoo was the best product of
the year, but it has approximations as well.
There are texture addressing problems that
are covered up by excessive filtering, so
Voodoo textures are quite blurry. But that’s
less annoying than being jagged.
boot What about Voodoo 2?

performance because if you’re not running
at a reasonable frame rate, there is no game.
Beyond that, you have to have fogging, you
have to have perspective correct texture
mapping, and you have to have good
lighting and interpolation.
boot How do you define “high performance ”?
Kirk Over a million polygons per second
texture mapping . . . everything turned on.
Riva 128 peaks at five million polygons a
second, but they’re very small polygons.
Clearly the CPU can’t provide that kind of
polygon throughput, but with higher processor
speeds over the next year or two, Riva 128 will
continue to scale-up. In 3D WinBench, our
chip is typically idle more than half the time
because you’re testing how fast a CPU can do
transformations and lighting and send us the
vertex data. We’d like to see benchmarks run
at higher resolutions because we have fill rate
to bum. We probably won’t bottleneck until
450MHz or 500MHz Pentium II.
boot So there’s no danger of being processor-
dependent?

Kirk Processor dependence is a double-
edged sword. Clearly it’d be better if we
were able to offload more work from the

with the MMX transition by really hyping it
before wrapping up production, and I think
Intel’s afraid of doing the same thing with
AGP. You’ll see a lot more talk about AGP
from Intel going forward. Its big push is just
about to begin.

boot Do you think it was a mistake for Intel to
provide so many flavors of AGP?

Kirk It’s to Intel’s advantage to make the
world very complicated in order to defend
itself against other CPU and bus interface
chip vendors trying to compete.

If Intel could have jumped immediately
to AGP 4s with DMA and execute mode,
that would have been the best. I’d like to
have had that last year. But Intel couldn’t
get there right away and chose an incre-
mental approach.

boot In the big picture , how important is it for
nVidia to get on motherboards?

Kirk When you’re integrated on the moth-
erboard, your customer is locked down.
They have to ship you for awhile. Your
chips are soldered on their boards and
they’re stuck with the inventory.
boot That’s an interesting choice of words—
stuck.

32 boot APR 98

Kirk In these exciting times of 3D graphics
moving very quickly, I don’t think that’s a
good strategy for PC OEMs. Their best
opportunity is to adopt the best new chip
every six months. And our strategy is to
introduce the best chip every six months.
boot So you’re not going after the mother-
board market?

Kirk We’re certainly interested in the
motherboard market if our customers are
interested in that sort of solution. We’re
currently on one of NEC’s motherboards.
But I’d say that fewer than 5% of the
systems sold have graphics soldered on
the motherboard, and I see that number
getting even smaller.

boot But motherboard integration is the most
economical way to do things.

Kirk You have to look at a higher level of
integration in the sub-$l,000 and sub-$500
PCs. But a better place to integrate might be
how Cyrix is integrating graphics and the
bus interface in the CPU. Those integrations
provide a better value, but it’s a low-end
kind of thing.

boot Do you see any significant role for inte-
grated audio and video media processors going
forward?

Kirk We like to learn from our mistakes
and we often joke that NV1 was the first to
demonstrate that the media processor is not
a good idea. We made that mistake a long
time ago . . . others are making it now.

3D requires a good amount of dedicated
hardware. So a media processor is never
going to be the fastest 3D engine. They’re

want them to be bargain-basement cheap.
They want the sweet spot, where the bulk of
boards are sold, which is $149 to $199.

That’s the problem Voodoo 2 will have —
3Dfx will be constrained by the number of
people willing to pay $299 for a graphics
board. That number is relatively small even
within its niche market, the real extreme
enthusiasts.

The problem with products at the lower
end is the chips selling in that space had to
be closed out. They had to get rid of them.
They only get cheaper if you wait. So you
sell things for the best price you can get.
boot So did you classify the Rendition part in
that category?

Kirk I don’t think it’s competitive with any
of the Riva-based boards.

boot Why not?

Kirk It’s not as fast. The visual quality is
probably pretty close, maybe better in some
ways and worse in other ways. But the per-
formance just doesn’t stack up.

boot Actually Rendition’s V2200 benchmarks are
neck-and-neck with the Riva, yet it only has a 64-
bit memory bus. Why isn’t your 128-bit card’s
lead larger?

Kirk Because Rendition’s competing with
our benchmark numbers from six months
ago, just like Intel was. It hasn’t seen our
second release. Our new drivers will use
more of the data path, and then you’ll see us
pull further ahead.
boot Who’s your closest competitor?

Kirk We’ll compete with Intel and we current-
ly compete with ATI. In spite of the fact that
everybody wants to compare us with 3Dfx, we
just don’t ever see them in competitive situa-
tions. It’s a completely different market.
boot Where do you see nVidia in two years and do
you see some of your competition dropping out?
Kirk Last year, 40 or 50 companies were all
going to be the next predominant 3D-graphics

going to be coming
out and saying,

“Well we’re not the
cheapest and we’re
not the fastest . . .
we’re the most
mediocre — so you
should buy our
product!” I just don’t
see a future in that.
boot Do you think
AMD’s K6+3D is that
kind of dead-end
product?

Kirk It’s going to be
great, and the Riva
128 will be the fastest
graphics to run with
it. The K6+3D will
take away the CPU
bottleneck for us, by
really accelerating
the transform and
lighting.

boot Does it bother you that the sub-$1,000
market has exploded and, in a lot of cases, sup-
planted high-end machines in retail?

Kirk No, I think it’s actually a very exciting
opportunity. Moving forward, you’ll see
nVidia products that are targeted for that
market.

boot Will this product be the current Riva 128
or a new product?

Kirk We first built the NV3 as a performance
product to ship with Intel’s fastest processors
and the high-end consumer machines. Over

time, it cost less to make
them, and we can consider
shrinking from .35-micron
to .25 -micron geometry.
When we get down to
extremely low cost, we can
begin to push into those
kinds of markets.
boot In a world of $99
graphics boards, what
makes Riva worth twice as
much as, say, a Stealth 2?
Kirk Our chip’s not more
expensive than the chip
that goes into the Stealth
2. What’s different is what
consumers are willing to
pay. People are willing to
pay for the value they get.
The number of games we
support and our level of
performance are a good
value for the price that
those boards are sold for.

Nobody wants their
boards to be too expen-
sive. And they also don’t

“I believe Voodoo was the best product of >

supplier. Some of them have already been
shaken out, and I expect a lot more will fall
by the wayside over die next year or two.
Companies leave the graphics business at
about one a week now, because it’s getting
very, very hard to compete. We have to be the
one to obsolete our own products and to come
out with the next fastest product. Everybody
who has been a leader in the past and then
lost the lead got complacent and stopped
working hard and stopped beating their own
products and let somebody else get in ahead
of them. We need to be vigilant to not do that.

And I don’t think you’ll see a lot of new
people entering this market. The Riva 128 is
about the size of the Pentium. And our next
generation is the size of a Pentium II. You
can’t just jump in and make one of those.

It’s a $20 million investment.

The combination of strong players already
in the market is going to prevent venture cap-
italists from funding some new startup. So the
only people who can enter the market anew
are the big players, like Intel. And it’s going
to be very difficult for them to move fast.
boot What do you think of Intel’s 740
technology?

Kirk I think i740 is a fine piece of technol-
ogy [smirks]. And it would have been very
competitive last year. I’m really glad it
didn’t come out last fall.

It’s in the performance class of a Riva
128. Actually it’s slightly slower, so it’s very

“Intel made a mistake with the MMX transition by really hyping it before it

lapping and leapfrogging in
parallel. It probably has at least
two teams working on graphics
now. Each of those is doing its
first product and just learning
the market. And that’s very hard.

This is not where its exper-
tise lies and a high-performance
3D chip now has about the
same complexity as a CPU. You
need people who know the
technology cold. The nVidia
team is composed of people
who’ve been doing 3D graphics
for 15 or 20 years.
boot nVidia pioneered the 128-bit
memory bus on a 3D accelerator.
But others are sure to follow.
What’s nVidia going to do to stay
ahead of the pack?

Kirk The 128-bit bus has given
us an extreme advantage in
terms of not even having to
worry about the pixel rate speeds.
As others do the same, they’re
going to have to go through the
same process we went through
in the past six months of tuning
drivers and reordering the work
to take advantage of that band-
width. It doesn’t work if you
haven't carefully analyzed the
work the driver does to make
sure the CPU doesn’t wait for
you to organize the work.

And we’re coming out on 128 bits with
the Riva 128 ZX, which will support 8MB
of memory and AGP 2x. I don’t know of
anybody else who is going to 128 bits.
boot What the heck is the Riva 128 ZX?

Kirk That’s the 8MB 2x AGP version of
NV3, and it will be shipping both in add-in
cards and OEMs this spring.
boot Any changes to the chip itself?

Kirk It’s not final yet, but we may change
the clockrate. We could run Riva 128 faster
than we do. We haven’t done it in the past
because it’s not the bottleneck. So we may
look at doing that for more headroom.
boot How much will the ZX cost?

Kirk Roughly the same ballpark as Riva 128.
boot So the current Riva should drop in price?
Kirk I can’t make that prediction; I just make
the chips. But that would be a good prediction.
boot Was it a mistake to limit Riva to 4MB?
Kirk It’s hard for me to say that anything
about the NV3 is a mistake because it’s the
most successful 3D graphics chip ever. I
will say that our next product, the Riva 128
ZX, extends to 8MB and also adds 2x AGP
support. We’re going to be shipping that
product in volume this spring. And the Riva
128 will become the low-end product.
boot What memory technology shows more
promise: RAMBUS or DDR SGRAM? Or some-
thing else entirely?

Kirk The next exciting memory technology
is integrated DRAM, which brings together

difficult to enter the market late with this
slower part. Intel really undershot the
market by building a 64-bit part. So it has
fill-rate limits, and as benchmarks and
games move to 800x600, it’s going to be
fill-rate bound. As CPUs move to 350 and
400 and 450MHz, it's going to be fill-rate
bound. It’s going to drop away.

However, Intel has considerable market-
ing muscle and will really help us legitimize
the 3D market.

boot But doesn’t Intel’s massive marketing
muscle scare you in any way?

Kirk Well, you’ve got to be scared of some-
body 1,000 times your size — it could
accidentally step on you and not even know!

boot Do you think Intel underestimated the
importance of 3D?

Kirk No, but I think it did underestimate the
time it would take to integrate the technology
and get to market. Intel’s not nimble like a
small company such as nVidia.

The other thing Intel underestimated
was our moving target, nVidia’s perform-
ance. And in the meantime our drivers have
given us another 50% in performance. In
terms of performance, we’re ahead and
accelerating because our product treadmill
introduces a significant major new product
every six months.
boot Is Intel capable of that?

Kirk I don’t believe it is. To do that in the
CPU space, it needs three or four teams over-

< the year, but it has approximations. There are texture addressing problems covered up by excessive

34 Boot APR 98

wrapping up production, and I think it’s afraid of doing the same thing with AGP.”

DRAM and graphics chips all on a single
chip. That’s the dark horse at this point.
boot What’s the benefit of integrated DRAM?
Kirk Vastly increased bandwidth. The only
reason RAMBUS is interesting is because
you’re able to get higher bandwidth into the
RAM. If your RAM’s integrated with the rest
of the graphics, the connection isn’t through
pins. It’s just on some bus inside the chip, so
it can be 128 bits, 256 bits, IK, 4K. It’s easy.
boot Will the Riva’s SGRAM hit a wall eventually?
Kirk With any VLSI technology there’s
going to be a point where you won’t be able
to reduce the geometry any more and you
won’t be able to put more transistors on a
chip each year.

But within the next year or two, I think
you’re going to begin to see PC graphics
chips able to do everything, in terms of both
performance and quality, that has been
done in workstations or supercomputers —
and that’s really exciting.

At that point, you have to start looking
at new opportunities. How do you make
pictures more real than anyone’s made
before? How do you support animation? Or
things like motion blur, reflections, shadows,
very realistic lighting, very complex smooth
skinned models and characters? You want
to get to the point where rather than saying
“That’s a pretty good computer graphic of a
tree. Why are you showing me that?” You
want that tree to be indistinguishable from
reality and you want to create a fantastic
tree that couldn’t possibly exist in reality,
but is believable because of how detailed
and finely rendered it is.

Graphics have huge growth potential.
boot Spill the beans on your next chipset
Kirk The NV4, which will be called Riva4,
will show this spring, and we’ll ship later
in the summer. It’ll be two to three times
faster in performance than the Riva 128.

It’s fully optimized for D3D 5 and 6, as
well as OpenGL. It’ll be the first main-

stream performance 3D processor to
support full multitexture rendering. The
fill rate is large enough where we’re not
a bottleneck. We’ve increased the peak
triangle rate from five million to well over
six million just to make sure we continue
to have headroom.

We’ll also support up to 24-bit floating-
point z-buffer; and in both OpenGL and
Direct3D DX6 we’ll support stencil buffer-
ing — which allows you to mark which pixels
on the screen have been touched by a particu-
lar operation. For example, it’s a way of doing
reflections with a mirror. You can draw your

scene, redraw the outline of the mirror with
the stencil tag, and then draw the reflection,
but the reflection only gets written where it’s
the stencil tag. So you can build up reflections
and shadows and great lighting effects with
the stencil buffer. I think it’s going to be a
very important feature this year.

boot Do you have any performance projections
for the Riva4? Frame rate and things like that?

Kirk We’ll be limited by CPU performance,
so I expect our fill rate with Riva4 will be in
the ballpark of two Voodoo 2s with SLI. And
our texturing rate matches. But there are
no benchmarks. You bump up against this
wall and faster products don’t measure any
faster. So that’s why we decided to push the
quality with the Riva4.

boot How much memory will the Riva4 support?

Kirk We’ll support 16MB configurations. I
can’t say whether we’re going to support
four or not. We’ll respond to pressure from
our PC customers,
but we think eight is
the sweet spot.
boot What kind of
clockrates are you
talking about for the
Riva 4?

Kirk That’s a choice
we haven’t made yet.
We’re going to look
at where we are with
respect to the CPUs
and decide how
much headroom
we need. One thing
we’ve done is
upgrade our hard-
ware interface to
require less interac-
tion with the CPU to
kick off a triangle for
DX5 and also for the
new DX6 interface.
And we’ve also
added some OpenGL hardware support.
boot What will the minimal processor be for
the Riva4?

Kirk The Riva4 will just get faster as you
add more processing power to it. So you
might ask, “What’s the slowest processor
Quake could run on at 30fps?” We’ll

The Green-Eyed Monster

The Riva 128 is also known as the NV3. Tell us the full NV1 story.

When NV1 was being built, the graphics and sound and game
controller parts of the PC were very fragmented. There weren’t
unifying standards; there wasn’t a single platform. So if you were
developing a PC game, you had to support 50 different graphics
cards and a bunch of different soundcards. It was really hard and
the PC wasn’t a platform, it was just a collection of almost unrelat-
ed things that just happened to be sharing the same processor.

NV1 was envisioned as unifying all the non-CPU parts of the
platform into a single standard. There were graphics, audio, and
Sega game ports.

But PC vendors and OEMs didn’t want to buy an integrated
graphics and sound chip; they wanted to buy a graphics chip, they
wanted to buy a sound chip, and they wanted to mix and match
those independently to optimize their costs. So the NV1 wasn’t a
good solution for them.

The other problem was timing. There was no API momentum,
in terms of the software developers united behind a common API.

filtering, so Voodoo textures are quite blurry. ”

So trying to introduce a new architecture and API to the software
developers at that point was just too much to push through.

It probably sold as many units as any of the game console chips
for the PC, but it wasn’t really a mainstream product.

And what happened to the NV2?

NV2 was a custom product that we did for a specific
customer. We’re not allowed to talk about who they are, but the
product never shipped.

So it died in development?

It was a great opportunity because it allowed us to develop
technology on someone else’s dime. With NV1, we learned the dos
and don’ts of working with the PC architecture, such as how to get
VGA right. It sounds easy, but you have to do it. And with NV2, we
learned a lot more about texturing strategies and about different
ways of rasterizing and more about the 3D pipeline. We were able
to pull all those pieces together and NV3 was built from start to
finish in under nine months. And I don’t think anybody else has
built a competitive 3D product in that kind of time frame.

APR 98 boot 35

Control Console

Any plans to get your architecture into the home consoles? The PowerVR folks have been
touting their presence in the next-generation Sega machine all to hell. Is that something nVidia
would want?

Absolutely, but that’s going to be driven by the evolution of the PC. Extrapolate
that forward a year or two and it’s very likely that the low-cost PC just eats the console
market.

So you’re not afraid of the Playstation 2 or Nintendo 128?

Well, you might see nVidia chips in a Playstation 2 or the Nintendo 128. If they’re
going for the best performance, we expect to be the performance leader.

What about the arcade space?

We’re members of the Open Arcade initiative and we’ve also been selected by a
couple of arcade manufacturers to integrate Riva 128 into their systems. So we’re not
directly in the arcade business, but by providing a high-performance solution on a
standard platform, we will get penetration in that market.

probably do that with a 166.
boot How much will Riva4 cost?

Kirk I’d expect it to be in the same ballpark
as the Riva 128: $149 to $199. Look at DRAM,
you’re paying about a dollar a megabyte.
You’re going to see huge memories on PCs
and graphics cards. That really points to
a graphics chip that has a high fill rate
and supports large resolutions and large
memory rates.

boot What will distinguish Riva4 from Voodoo 2?

Kirk We support full 32-bit color rendering
at full speed. One of the things people don’t
talk about very much is multipass texturing.
If you’re only doing 16-bit color 5-6-5, after
you blend it a few times you begin to get
some strange banding and pattern effects.
We’ll see this on Voodoo 2, but you won’t
get those effects with 32-bit color.
boot Will this be the Achilles heel of the
Voodoo 2?

Kirk I think that’s going to be a significant
weakness. We’re going to be hands-down
the quality leader with Riva4. We’re doing a
very solid implementation of per-pixel mip-
mapping. We do isotropic filtering, which
has better quality than trilinear. It blurs less
without anti-sparkling. I expect that people
will be really stunned by the quality we’re
able to provide.

boot Is full-screen anti-aliasing an important
feature? Or is it just a one trick pony some
players will attempt?

Kirk In the next year or two, that will
become a mainstream feature and will be
expected. Everyone will have it and you
won’t talk about it. It’ll be what you do. On a
3D workstation, you just wouldn’t accept not

Kirk l don’t actually remember what the
API was called. The reason for abandoning
it was that it’s not a particularly good idea.
Proprietary APIs are anticompetitive and
not a way to really further the 3D market.

We are very, very interested in increasing
the adoption and penetration of high-per-
formance 3D and standard APIs to unify
the industry. Competing on performance
and features along the same path is best for
consumers. Proprietary APIs fragment the
market and make it harder for developers to
target what they’re doing and more difficult
for consumers. It’s much better for con-
sumers to buy a card because it runs all the
games. They just buy the fastest card that
does the best pictures.

We worked very closely with Microsoft in
defining DX6. The Riva4 is probably the

OpenGL compliance. And now we’re going
to do performance tuning. We’ve done sim-
ulations and we think we’re going to end up
in the high 40s or low 50s.

boot Still ; other companies, such as 3Dfx,
Rendition, and PowerVR especially, have the
resources, the money, and the time to court
developers.

Kirk We should worry about that because
there’s a certain amount of education that
needs to occur with developers for them to
understand what kind of operations are
expensive and what kind of operations are
efficient. An example is when developers
use D3D to draw independent triangles
versus drawing strips or meshes. Strips or
meshes are much faster because you only
have to transform the shared points that
come together once. If they’re independent,

“I think i740 is a fine piece of technology [smirks]. And it would have been very competitive last year. ”

having anti-aliasing. And the same thing
will be true eventually in the PC space.

You’ll see some anti-aliasing this year,
but it’ll cost in terms of performance and
the implementations won’t be very good.
Most vendors are just learning; they haven’t
been doing it for 20 years.
boot And we’re talking edge anti-aliasing?
Kirk Yeah. Essentially people already do
texture filtering. Mip-mapping is texture
anti-aliasing. There’s also time anti-aliasing
(motion blur). Both are common. What’s
remaining is edge anti-aliasing. We will offer
full-scene edge anti-aliasing at a slight per-
formance penalty with the NV4. We think
higher resolution is going to be a better
choice for people, but we offer a choice.
boot What kind of performance hit?

Kirk It depends how far you’re pushing the
fill rate, because it bums some of the fill rate.
So if you’re not running at high resolution
and running into fill-rate limits, it may have
no impact on performance. But if you’re
trying to run at 800x600 or 1024x768, you
may run into fill-rate limitation.
boot Why did nVidia abandon its native API?

only chip with a full implementation of all
the DX6 features. We could be the refer-
ence implementation.

We have a very good relationship with the
DirectX developers. Our lead time is much
longer than theirs, so I don’t want to say we
drive what they’re doing, but we have to lead
what they’re doing. We get some ideas from
where they’re going and vice versa.
boot If you’re a D3D card only, do you ever need
to interface directly with game developers?

Kirk We’re not a D3D card only. We also
support OpenGL fully because our cus-
tomers demand it. And by the time this is
printed, we’ll have released our full OpenGL
ICD on both Windows 95 and Windows NT.
And I believe it will be the fastest full OpenGL
implementation since 3Dfx’s implementa-
tion. Our target level performance is in the
Voodoo 2 class with NV3.

Right now we’re at 39fps in Quake II at
640x480. And we’re at 34fps at 800x600.
What we’ve been working on so far is

it might be the same point, but the hard-
ware doesn’t know, so you end up doing
useless work. So those are kind of things
that we can help to teach developers.

Some developers are already very sophis-
ticated with 3D; others are just learning and
there’s a lot of hard mistakes we prefer they
didn’t have to make.

boot Has Microsoft ever put pressure on nVidia
not to support OpenGL?

Kirk Microsoft pushes us to do more and
faster. We’ve been a great help in their evan-
gelism efforts. But we’re really API agnostic.
If you ask me to make a choice, I don’t really
care. The important part is that it is a stan-
dard that is supported across the industry.
boot If the standard is the all-powerful force,
what do you want to see happen to native APIs,
such as Glide and Rendition?

Kirk They ’re really shooting themselves in
the foot. Look at Rendition and 3Dfx and
PowerVR. My numbers may not be exactly
correct, but I believe Riva 128 shipped more

“Only in the last year have more than a million people had 3D >

36 boot APR TS

How I fit 1 speeding downtown bus
a crippled lunar lander, and
5 car-tossing tornados into a

^ INCH SQUARE.”

Super-Fast, Extremely Vast
PERSONAL STORAGE DRIVE

Product Information Number 181

STEPHEN HUNTER FLICK

Sound Designer

As the two-time Academy Award-
winning sound effects specialist
whose work includes films like Speed,
Apollo 13, and Twister, Stephen
Hunter Flick works with major movie
studios creating some of film's most
incredible effects. From compiling
over 2,000 sound files to create a
massive tornado to transporting or
even cutting straight to digital pic-
ture, Stephen's work takes big space.
With his Oaz drive and its sustained
transfer rate of up to 6.62MB per
second, he can back up 1 whole
gigabyte in as little as 10 minutes.
The Jaz drive not only gives him the
flexibility to run applications and
files straight from disk, it's also
compatible with nearly all operating
systems. So while Stephen's work is
truly larger than life, it still
fits neatly into his pocket.

iomega

in 1997 alone than all those have ever
shipped combined. That’s really a testament
to this fragmentation I’m describing. They’re
just limiting their markets by being propri-
etary. And I think it would be better for all
concerned if they were willing to play in the
mainstream.

boot What do you think of alternate architec-
tures like Talisman or PowerVR or Oak?

Kirk They’re very interesting. Talisman was
poorly timed in that it answers a question
nobody has to ask anymore. Talisman
reduced memory-bandwidth cost with parti-
tioned rendering that allowed you to access
the frame-buffer memory less and conserve
frame-buffer memory. But at a dollar a
megabyte, who cares?
boot Is Talisman is dead?

Kirk People continue to do Talisman
implementations. I believe two are still hap-
pening, but the only one I’m familiar with
looks like the chipset alone is going to cost
about $150 to make and will be almost as
fast as Riva 128. So I don’t really think it’s a
viable economic alternative at this point.
boot What about PowerVR’s claims that its tile-
based rendering is more efficient than the
traditional 3D pipeline?

Kirk We’ve evaluated pilot architecture and
have done performance simulations and
haven’t been able to produce one that
measures up to our basic brute force, fast
and wide data paths. It’s hard to beat 128 bits.

And there are problems with a tiled
architecture. If you’re doing rendering in a
tiled order, you actually collide with some of
the semantics of DirectX. For example, if

you mix 2D operations such as blitz with
3D operations, you do some 3D rendering,
then you flip it around and do some more
3D rendering. You just can’t do that with a
tiled architecture and you’ll fail Microsoft’s
WHQL, which means you can’t ship in
mass-market PCs. So until that problem is
fixed, it’s kind of a serious drawback.
boot What game have you pulled off the shelf
in the last three months and said, “My God, this
is absolutely great”?

Kirk Quake II is awesome. It’s the pat
response. I’m sure you just hear way too
much of it, but it’s what they did with the
models, the moving parts and the lighting.
boot What could id have done better?

Kirk id could have managed the texture
memory better and not expended as much
memory in some areas and then have the
ability to have higher-resolution textures
for the walls and things like that. The
biggest weakness, and not just Quake II
but all the running-around-in-a-bunch-
of-rooms games, is that the wall textures
are still fairly low resolution. As you take
advantage of AGP, you can have a lot more
textures and really bump up that level of
detail. Also, with multitexture you can
have repeating wall texture and a detailed
texture, which breaks up the repetitiveness,
then lighting texture, and a slight amount
of gloss for the reflection map. Do two
passes with multitexture and you get a
more interesting look with a lot more
complexity.

boot Does it concern you that most of today’s
top-selling games are low-brow 2D titles such

as Barbie Fashion Designer, Tonka Search and
Rescue, and Riven?

Kirk I don’t care. Those sell to the lowest
common denominator and it’s only in the last
year that more than a million people have 3D
accelerators. I mean real 3D accelerators. I
don’t count the S3 products as real accelera-
tors. So now there’s a foundation for a
market for 3D games and entertainment
products on the PC. There’ll be 10 or 20
million real 3D chips sold soon. Even so, I
expect more of that, because even Barbie
Fashion Designer would be better if it was 3D
Barbie Fashion Designer,
boot Is it bad that new products are being
developed so fast? Readers write in and say,
“Man! Just when I got my Riva 128, I’m already
hearing about the next-generation processor.”
Kirk I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but if you
have to blame somebody, blame Intel. It
pushed the product treadmill by coming out
with a significantly different CPU every six
months. And that pushes PC OEMs to make
a new platform every six months. And we’re
determined to fit into that world and deliver a
great 3D graphics product every six months.

I guess when you buy a PC, you should
expect to replace it every year. But you don’t
need a whole new PC just to run Excel
faster. So rather than buying a new PC, you
can spend $200 on a new graphics card and
get performance that’s a lot more exciting.
That extends the life of your PC investment
and that’s less painful for consumers.

But really, if you think about it, it’s great
to see everything get faster every year. I go
out and get the latest and greatest. 0

“The fire fighters saved my family,

STEPHEN TRIMM

Small Business Owner

The Jaz Disk

saved my business.”

When fire alarms woke the Trimms,
Stephen's first concern was his family's
safety. Next came the safety of his
company, Innova Associates, based
in the very home which was burning
to the ground. However with his
Jaz* drive and its sustained transfer
rate of up to 6.62MB per second,
days earlier, he had backed up his
whole company (as much as 1 whole
gigabyte in as little as 10 minutes)
on a single Jaz disk. Despite the
fact that his home was destroyed
and his computer melted, his files
remained safe on his amazing Jaz
disk. Stephen's Jaz drive not only
gives him the flexibility to run
applications and files straight from
disk, it's also compatible with nearly
all operating systems. While rebuild-
ing their lives remains a major task,
Stephen rebuilt his business with
the click of a button.

Find the Jaz drive at
your local computer
retailer or visit us at:

www.iomega.com

Iomega

Copyright© 1998 301x Interactive. Inn. The 3Dfx Interactive logo and Voodoo Graphics. Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Rush are trademarks ot 3Dfx Interactive. Inc. Pvros imagelrom Ultima: Ascension and Vampire image.from Wing Commander Prophecy
courtesy ol ORIGIN Systems © 1998 ORIGIN Systems. Inc, ORIGIN is an Electronic Arts company. F-15 image from F-15 is courtesy of Jane’s Combat Simulations. Jane’s is registered trademark of Jane’s Information Group, Ltd. Images from FIFA
Road to World Cup '98 and World Cup Soccer '98 are courtesy of Electronic Arts. © 1998 Electronic Arts. FIFA Official licensed product of the FIFA World Cup France 98. All rights reserved. All other trademarks and the trade names are the proper-
ties of their respective-owners. Cloud image from Final Fantasy VII is courtesy of Eidos Interactive and SquareSoft © 1997. 1998 Square Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Final Fantasy and SquareSoft are registered trademarks of Square Co.. Ltd. HIRO
MIYAMOTO image from Daikatana is courtesy of Eidos Interactive and ION Storm. HIRO MIYAMOTO name and character are trademarks of ION Storm. L.P. Copyright © 1998 ION Storm, L.P. Ail rights reserved. Lara image from Tomb Raider is cour-
tesy of Eidos Interactive. Tomb Raider, Lara Croft and her likeness are trademarks of Eidos Interactive. © 1998 Eidos Interactive. Elexis image from SiN is courtesy of Ritual Entertainment. Ritual and SiN are trademarks of Ritual Entertainment. SiN

Power. Software. Visuals. Quality. Wicked Fast,

Product Information Number 372

images are copyright © Ritual Entertainment. Activision ® is a registered trademark of Activision, Inc. Half-Life image is courtesy of Valve, He. and Sierra-On-Line, Inc. Haif-Life is a registered trademark of Sierra-On-Line. Inc. StarSiege image is cour-
tesy of Dynamics and Sierra-On-Line, Inc. StarSiege is a registered trademark of Sierra-On-Line, Inc. © 1998 Sierra-On-Line, Inc. Forsaken image is courtesy of Acclaim Entertainment and Probe Entertainment. Forsaken is a registered trademark of
Acclaim Entertainment. © 1998 Acclaim Entertainment. Inc. Skies image is courtesy of SegaSoft Networks, Inc. Skies is registered trademark of SegaSoft Networks, Inc. © 1998 SegaSoft Networks, Inc. Messiah image, is courtesy of Shiny
Entertainment and Interplay Productions. Messiah images are trademarks of Shiny Entertainment. © Copyright Shiny Entertainment 1998. Monster Truck image from Monster Truck Madness II is courtesy of Terminal Reality and Microsoft Games.
Microsoft and Monster Truck Madness II are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. © Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1998. Incoming image courtesy of Rage Software, pic. Incoming is a registered trademark of Rage Software, pic. ©
1998 Copyright Rage Software, pic. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved. www.3dfx.com

1

Sisi

Notebooks.

Mysterious black boxes. Pure PC Power
packed in impossibly small spaces. You see notebooks
everywhere, but understand so little about what makes them tick.

These technological mutations hide their secrets well, but this much we
know: They are passive entities, nonviolent, and incapable of human emotion. |

Sure, you can ask questions if you like — “What’s inside the case?” or “How can so much
power and capacity fit in such a tiny cavity?” — but you’ll never receive a straight answer from
the people at “tech support” or from the “user’s manual” that shipped with your machine.
Someone doesn’t want you to know the truth. | Yet the truth must be told. Damn the grisly details
and gory photographs. The truth must be told. | So, in the cover of darkness, we made our way into
Micron Technology’s top-secret laboratory hidden in the seemingly quiet community of Nampa,
Idaho. We overpowered one of the company’s highest-ranking engineers, plied him with sodium
pentothal, and forced him to break the silence that has shadowed the PC notebook industry for
years. Together we dissected the Micron TransPort XI<E, a 233MHz powerhouse that received
a coveted 10 bootVerdict in boot\7. | Suffice it to say, our suspicions have been confirmed.
Notebook computers are silicon wonders; triumphs of the economy of miniaturiza-
tion. | Now, for the first time, the shocking truth can be told. Follow along as
we unveil the engineering mysteries of notebook computers.

— Biyan Del Rizzo

Did you know? The LCD is the most expensive component in any notebook. The hinge on the LCD, by the way, is rated on the number
of times it opens and closes. This hinge in the notebook we dissected is rated and tested to meet or exceed more than 7,000 openings • The mini-
LCD isn’t limited in scope or purpose to system-status icons. Potentially, any information can be piped through this part. A special bootPrize goes
to any reader who can hack his mini-LCD to be a rear-view mirror for Quake • The only way to coax more power from a notebook is to go into the BIOS and

/ Just like desktop systems, notebooks are
stuffed with intestinal cabling. They use two
types of cable leads: ink-painted and tin. Tin
leads (silver-colored) are much more expensive,
but are more durable and can be repeatedly
inserted and extracted without wearing out. Ink-
painted leads (black-colored), such as the one
found on the keyboard connector, tend to wear
down over time. So why would a notebook
company bother to use the more expensive tin
leads for devices that defy ^oof-style upgrad-
ing? Well, machines do have to be repaired
once in a while, and tin leads help accommo-
date the service technician and ensure overall
repair reliability. While ink leads may have to be
replaced after about 20 extractions, tin leads
can last up to ten times longer.

Most notebook manufacturers don’t typically
bother bolting the gameport in place — it’s
usually buttressed into position by several
other components and a cable. But this
notebook's joystick/MIDI port (the brown board
directly underneath the L-shaped modem) is
screwed onto the motherboard using a solid
metal mounting.

Just about every component in a notebook must be
reduced in size-real estate is far more precious in the
mobile landscape. And the miniaturization doesn’t come
cheap. However, this notebook uses the same 100-pin
TQFP ESS1879 FM sound chip found in desktops. The
ESS692 chip provides the robust wavetable-synth engine.

• ''f , *: A. " / You may have noticed that some LCD screens are positioned slightly to the right or left of center. There’s a good reason
0> for that— the video inverter, which takes five volts and turns it into 2,000v of power for the LCD’s backlight. The inverter,

you see, is too thick to place directly behind the LCD, so the part typically finds refuge off to the side of the screen. Micron,
however, has beaten the problem by integrating the inverter into the motherboard. Power connections to the LCD are routed
% ♦ through the right hinge.

Inverters generally aren’t connected by screws and can easily be popped in and out. Like any other active notebook part, they
can blow up. But it’s rare. You’re more likely to experience a hard drive failure or fan malfunction. An inverter has a life span
ranging from seven to ten years, so even if it does die, the CPU would most likely already be outdated.

Removing the LCD case is a chore. Although only four screws need to be removed, the glass is held in place by 21 interlocking
clips, each of which must be unlocked by hand. The LCD also has a ground loop (connected to the chassis ground) to eliminate any nasty
pulsating effects.

tweak specific bit settings. But even then, the notebook would probably just overheat and eventually shut down. Notebooks afford no room for heat increases •
Besides the power battery, the only other battery in the entire notebook is on the motherboard. It’s used for holding the CMOS BIOS setup information • The bigger
the power supply, the less it’ll cost. Desktop power supplies may cost only $10 a piece, but a miniature version for notebooks can cost up to $200 • Black notebooks
aren’t allowed for sale in Germany. The CE marketing certification spec prohibits it • There are three gold-plated screws in the Micron notebook. Gold screws are used

/

The LCD panel contains 1 ,024 horizontal and 768 vertical lines.

At each intersection is a Thin Film Transistor (TFT). Each transis-
tor (you can call it a pixel) consists of three dots— in standard
RGB format— resulting in 2,359,296 dots. It’s virtually impossible
to create a perfect LCD; out of all those dots, some are destined
to fail. Even though it’s difficult to spot one broken dot, manufac-
turers stick to a maximum failure rate. Micron will reject the LCD
if more than 20 dots (or seven pixels) are whacked, or if there are
six whacked dots (two pixels) within 10mm of each other on a
12.1 -inch LCD (the distance is 5mm for a 13.3-inch screen).

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The entire notebook is just one huge heat dissipation system. The thermal conduit draws heat up from
the heat plate, which is connected directly to the CPU. The fan doesn’t actually start kicking in until a
thermostat (positioned only 2mm away from the CPU) reaches a few degrees within Intel’s safety spec.

Other cooling sources include both device bays, the metal chassis (which is used as a passive heat
conductor), and the copper cord, which helps direct the heat flow up through the plate. Once the fan
kicks in, air is drawn through the keyboard as well as the sides and bottom of the case, and then is
blown out the back. With a Tillamook 233MHz, the fan will kick in about 10% to 20% of the time.

Environmental conditions are a major concern for any notebook component, and the same holds
true for the mini-LCD. Subjecting it to extreme cold or heat, or poking it with your finger or a ball-
point pen, is a bad idea. And the mini-LCD is a lot more delicate than the already sensitive main LCD.
You may think pressing down hard on the mini-LCD to look at all the icons simultaneously is kind of
cool, but it’s not; you can severely damage it.

Many notebook components are securely mounted with screws bored into
the motherboard or exterior chassis, but other parts, including the gameport,
modem, and LCD inverter, are actually held in place by the surrounding compo-
nents. Many of these individual pieces are actually double-sided and stacked on
top of each other. Take the motherboard, for example. You can easily identify the
PC card drive, the north and south bridges, the third small outline DIMM slot
(notebook DIMMs are smaller than desktops DIMMs), and hard drive connectors.

But unless you physically remove the PC card drive, you’ll never unearth the video
subsystem hidden underneath.

Because a notebook motherboard contains thousands of parts (some of which
can’t be seen by the naked eye), manually assembling one would not only be
time-consuming, but a logistical nightmare. So notebook manufacturers designed
an automation scheme— the waveflow process.

You start with a big, blank, green PC board. You then attach all the resistors and capacitors using an adhesive
solder paste (any parts that actually penetrate the board may also be soldered by hand). You next place the
board in the waveflow machine. As the board moves through the machine on a conveyor belt, the surface mount
technologies (SMTs), such as graphics chips and other integrated circuits, are affixed in rapid succession, much
like a machine gun firing multiple rounds of ammunition. Once one side is finished, the board is flipped over and
the waveflow process begins on the other side. After all the parts are affixed, the board toddles along into an
oven where the solder paste liquifies and secures the SMT parts more permanently. Next the board is cooled off
and rinsed in a special cleaning solution that removes excess solder paste and ensures that all the contacts are
sound. The more parts affixed via the waveflow process, the better the overall reliability. Even better, this entire
process can take as little as ten minutes, depending on the board size and complexity.

The power supply is an intelligent creature. Not only does it regulate the voltages for
different CPU flavors, it’s also responsible for supplying the correct amount of power to
the multitude of components integrated within, including the floppy drive (1 2 volts), hard
drive (5v), modem (5v), and video controller (3.3v).

Precision power is a must. Let’s say the voltage dips on the 3.3v line going to the
system memory. If it dips too far, the DRAM can freeze, effectively cutting off the CPU’s
access and hanging your system out to dry. Suffice it to say, the more consistent the
power flow, the greater the reliability. The power supply’s error tolerance is largely
dependent on the quality of its construction. An inferior power supply will have a 10%
to 20% tolerance level; a good one will allow no more than 5%.

S In sleep mode, the notebook’s power consumption is reduced by 98%, and the
main power control is transferred to the backup device, a tiny 36 milliamp
battery. Once you’ve suspended your computer, you can swap one of the main bat-
teries from the device bay, a procedure known as a “warm swap.” A “hot swap”
occurs when you have two charged batteries in the device bay and remove one,
forcing the second battery to maintain power for the entire system.

With desktop PCs, you get an assortment of jumpers to fool around with clock speeds and system
voltage. With a notebook, however, you aren’t afforded such luxuries. When you first turn on a 4
notebook, the built-in BIOS does a chip detect and sets up the appropriate clock timings as |
well as the voltages for the core and I/O. The system is then fired up— and it’s all done — ^

automatically .

Desktop CPUs almost always have the same voltage requirements, but in
notebooks, the voltages for the I/O (the pins used to interface with other com- q
ponents) and the core (the CPU’s inner circle, if you will) are different for almost nJw

every chip (fine-tuned voltages ensure power consumption is never higher than
need be).

The P55C 166MHz chip, for example, has an I/O of 3.3v and a core of 2.5v. Conversely, the
233MHz Tillamook has an I/O of 2.5v and a core of 1 .8v. Voltage for the 266MHz Tillamook part is 2.5v
and 2.0v, respectively. Again, since each CPU is different, you need an intelligent BIOS to set up the whole

in areas where grounding and conductivity are vitally important (for example, the LCD) • The development cycle for a notebook can take up to one and a half years. For a
PC, the cycle can be completed in as little as three months • The most expensive part of a notebook is the LCD. The CPU is second • Notebooks use special plastics with
built-in ElectroMagnetiC' Interference (EMI) shielding. The LCD cable contains more EMI coating than any other component • Speakers are covered with either screen mesh
or cloth. Mesh is stronger and doesn’t dampen the volume, but lets in more dust • There is no linear scale between size of the components and their power consumption

- §j ' ' j

....

© GORY DETAILS

The notebook dissection took just
under two hours to complete. The
operation could’ve been completed
in mere minutes if we’d wielded our
screwdrivers with impunity, but we
decided to document the process
with photography and probe all the
innards as they were removed from
the case. In all, we removed a total
of 82 components. Here’s a full
breakdown:

1 . Chassis

2. Warm Swap Battery

3. PC Card Holder

4. Secondary Motherboard

5. Primary Motherboard

6. Heat Pipe

7. DC-DC Board

8. Bottom Fan Bracket

9. CPU Mount

10. SoundCard

11. Heat Transfer Plate

12. I/O Door Covers

13. CPU Board

14. Inverter Board

15. Mini LCD

16. Fan

17. Fan Cover

18. Gameport

19. Mini LCD Cover

20. Floppy Drive

21 . Junction Board/POB

22. Embedded Modem

23. LCD & Cover

24. Speakers

25. Speaker Covers

26. Mouse Pad

27. Mouse Pad Support

28. Keyboard

29. System Battery

30. CD-ROM Drive

31 . Primary Hard Drive

... 52 Miscellaneous screws
and parts

46 boot APR 98

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iixu

Begfox-One

Based around a 1 8. 432 MHz ARM RISC processor, the Geo fox-
One 's slim physique hides either 4MB or 16MB of memory. M

Psion 's EP0C32 operating system takes care of all your system If

business, with a lone Type II 3v or 5v PC card slot available for a tj

modem or another peripheral. IrDA or a serial connection lets you ¥
talk to other EP0C32S or compatible PCs. A Glidepoint pad and
mini-keyboard handle all your interfacing needs — no handwriting
recognition spoken here— with buttons galore granting you one-
touch access to all of the PDA’s major apps, including e-mail, web
browser, spreadsheets, word processor, and more. Adding new apps is
a flash card or OPL file away. Windows users will feel right at home
with all the drag-and-drop action and familiar keyboard shortcuts. The
6.8-inch diagonal display does 640x320 in 16 grays. The
rubberized keys are a chore; they need to be raised a hair g | |gfg

for precision typing. Also, dragging on the Glidepoint to high- ®
light text is a learning experience. With all its built-in software,
the Geofox-One can keep you on-the-move and in-touch quickly ™
and easily. 4MB, $560; 16MB $675;
www. geo fox. com

Philip Ve_

Doubling the CPU and modem speed of its predecessor, the 500 boasts a 75MHz MIPS ' ll
RISC processor and 28.8Kbps modem. The unit comes with either 16MB or 24MB DRAM, 1
l giving it the most memory we've ever seen in a PDA— you’ll need it in the world
of Windows CE 2.0. The backlit LCD is 640x240/16 shades of gray. Ten shortcut
. keys provide quick access to built-in programs, including CE 2.0 apps and a
y | slew of bundled utilities and accessories. The Velo sorely lacks

< - trm lrDA and a PC Card Sl0t ° n its

W attractive chassis, but

it does come with an £

AC adapter, docking
station, and NiMH

gSnKSgg battery pack that’s con- :
figured to charge your
MMlp batteries every time you
IgiP^ sync with your desktop.

Audio quality toggles between two mk
Ipp^ levels. An external button allows you

record voice notation. $700 (16MB), $800 fli
(24MB); www.velo.philips.com wBl

EvWex Freest y/e

boot wangled an early prototype of one of the first Pilot-sized PDAs to run Windows CE 2.oWjk

The Freestyle is powered by NEC’s VR4 1 02 MIPS RISC processor, and comes standard with

8MB ROM and 2MB DRAM (8MB optional). A tiny virtual keyboard, handwriting recognition wm. ^ pP

software, and digital ink handle text entry. A voice recorder takes care of your random

messages to self. I/O options include a serial sync cradle with an optional 33.6Kbps modem, P

IrDA, and a compact flash card slot for a wireless modem or pager (you can buy memory
upgrade cards as well). The backlit screen does monochrome at 240x320. Quick-access buttons deliver your calendar,
contact database, note taker, and tasks list. The Freestyle feels exactly like the Pilot in your front shirt pocket, and if
you’re a die-hard CE 2.0 nut, this might be the PDA for you. Price to be announced; www.everex.com

find yourself
fondling your

Personal Digital

Assistant while

standing in movie

libidinous mores-

sexier playmate,

palmtop computers
aims to woo you
away from the

latest version of

Shajj) Mobiloii H(^4100 m

This Windows CE 2.0 device comes with a MIPS RISC R4000 processor, 12MB EDO RAM, built-in 33.6Kbps modem, IrDA port, and
Type II PC card slot. You also get a voice recorder and an optional PC card digital camera to send 8-blt/1 IKHz WAV files and
640x480/1 6-bit color JPEGs to friends. The 6. 5- inch diagonal 640x240 touch screen does 16 grays, is backlit, and lacks ghosting
or artifacting. Seven dedicated one-touch application keys send you straight to your e-mail, contact database, calendar, task list,
and pocket versions of MS Word, Excel, and Internet Explorer. The Mobilon is a big step forward fdr Sharp, but beware: The unit
won’t fit in your breast pocket, the keyboard is soft, and the system is wont to intermittently lock up for a few seconds despite the

booming memory allotment. Look for our future review of the HC-4500 and its color

display. $699 (camera $399); www.sharp-usa.com

essayePa± 2UW

This Apple gadget is bulky, but can sync with
your Windows PC, and with three more megs of
DRAM, it races past its sluggish predecessor.
Armed with a 160MHz StrongARM SA-1 10 RISC
processor, the 2100 has 8MB ROM, 4MB DRAM,
and 4MB flash memory for storing user data.

The Newton OS 2. 1 has the coolest system
sounds in PDAville, and runs a word processor,
e-mail client, web browser, spreadsheet app,
calendar, and address book, among
other mini-apps. Handwriting
recognition has been

improved (Apple says
the software has a
93,000 word built-in
dictionary), but if it
still drives you psycho,
you can use the gener-
ously sized virtual
keyboard or a $90
optional mini-keyboard
' that plugs into your serial
port. The 480x320 LCD does
16 grays and is 5.9 inches
diagonal— that about an inch less
than the competition, but a width of 3.3
inches makes the screen seem bigger than
the others we’ve played with. Besides the serial
port, you get IrDA and two Type II PC
card slots. No word yet on whether the
Newton division is in it for the long haul,
or ready to hang up the cardigan and call
it a night. $1,000; www.apple.com

Instruments
A vino

Based on TTs “ highly cus-
tomized and proprietary Z80
processor” (the actual specs are
shrouded in secrecy), the Avigo will
make Pilot wannabes think twice. It’s only slightly
larger than the 3Com pocket delight, but still small enough to
fit in your breast pocket. The 240x160 backlit screen provides enough lumines-
cence to guide you around a darkened room. Even better, you can orient in

either letter or landscape formats. For text entry Jne Avigo provides a virtual keyboard as well
as a system called T9, which divides the entire alphabet into nine squares, each containing
three letters. As you tap each square, the Avigo checks its built-in dictionary and begins deci-
phering the word you’re tapping out, displaying alternate words based on possible approxima-
tions. The unit ships with Lotus Organizer 97, but if you cough up the cash fora full version of
Puma’s IntelliSync, you'll be able to sync other PIMs (including ECCO Pro, ACT!, and Outlook,) via
the Avigo’s serial PC Link or IrDA port. Native software includes a scheduler, memo pad, calcula-
tor, doodle pad, world clock, and expense tracker. Four basic games and a developer’s API can be
downloaded directly from TTs web site. No third-party apps are available— yet. $299; wvm.tl.com

card that shoots through the ether in less than a
second. While the V-Card device is fully IrDA compli-
ant Palm has no immediate plans to sync it directly
with PCs (but the company has confessed that it’s
open to licensing the project).

On screen, the Palm III runs under the third
incarnation of the svelte Palm OS. This new version J
sports a few cosmetic touch-ups, including better 1
font choices and a view-byrlist option in the 1
launcher, which can now divvy up apps by category}
And when it comes time to upgrade to Palm OS
v.4.0, you won't need to buy a whole new memory
chip, as was previously the case. The Palm III is ^
flash upgradable. ggj

For current Pilot and PalmPilot users, two W
upgrade routes are available. Owners of all ^||
models can purchase a software/memory/IR Wsm
upgrade for an estimated $150 (the final price
k may vary). This doesn ’t add the backlight Skj
feature to pre-PalmPilot models, so

vanilla Pilot users have the option of M
trading in their current PDAs for $75'
Bj P p a* towards the purchase of a Palm III.

Based on our hands-on experi -
WaKpj ence with the Palm III, it looks like
H mSj* Palm has another winner on its hands.
W/jjW $399; palmpilot.3com.com

Following the colossal success
jU 3 of its previous PDAs (which
0X ' garner some 70% of the
handheld market), Palm

Computing follows up with the third generation of
its pocket prize, the aptly named Palm III.

The first thing you'll notice about the new model
is how much smaller it feels in your hand or pocket.
Surprise! The Palm III shares the same dimensions
as previous iterations, but clever component manip-
ulation has allowed the designers to ergonomically
smooth the device’s corners, creating a much more
compact feel. The redesign also results in a much
sturdier construction that’s better equipped to
survive the bangs and bruises of the real world.

A new stock flip cover, reminiscent of old Star
Trek communicators, also protects your screen.

And tucked into the case is a sleek new metal A
stylus whose head screws off to reveal a Jm
secret pin for hard resets in the field.

In addition to an expanded 2MB of
memory, the Palm Ill’s most , /

notable new feature is the
much-requested IrDA port,
which allows Palm III users to H
share records and apps, includ- 1 gf
ing an innovative e-business

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Product Information Number 261

■wtafftNU* iRAnftpTp system-bus speeds past 66MHz, some main-

PCISETS/AGPSETS board makers have pushed the 430TX into the

The following core-logic chipsets are designed 83MHz realm, although stability may be com-
for folks hangin ' with the Zero Insertion Force promised at these speeds.
crew— such as Intel's Pentium MMX, AMD's
K6, Centaur's WinChip, and Cyrix's 6x86MX.

VIA APOLLO
1 VP2/97

HK|v ‘1 A staple of motherboard

"Jj| makers wanting a non-
t|| Intel chipset motherboard,
^ VIA Technologies’ superior

’• specs and performance are
gaining acceptance. Among the older
VIA PCIsets, the VP2/97 is a hefty beast capa-
ble of handling all manner of CPUs and com-
ing correct with up to 512MB of EDO or
SDRAM memory (all of it cachable) and up to
a whopping 2MB of L2 cache. All your favorite
peripherals such as USB, Ultra DMA/ATA-33,
and MMX are present. Despite the company-
endorsed 66MHz speed limit, it revs to 75MHz
without much trouble. The only thing missing
from the mix is AGP.

INTEL 430FX

One of the oldest Socket 7 PCIsets (a.k.a.
Triton back when Intel was naming PCIsets
after sea gods), the 430FX established Intel’s
iron-grip on the core-logic industry. This no-

frills chipset handles up to

j 128MB of EDO DRAM (with

64MB cachable). Given that it
doesn’t support many mod-
em features, the 430FX is
; R relegated to bargain-bin
p motherboard status,
although the 430FX does
support ancient 60MHz non-
MMX Pentiums— a boon considering the latest
chipsets only support 90MHz and above.

VIA APOLLO VP3

Improving on the solid per- iBB

formance of the VP2, the Kmm-x ‘ y'yfm

Socket 7-based VP3

throws a whopping 1GB | '

of main memory into

the mix (yes, all of it

cachable) on top of the 2MB

L2 cache, as well as support for AGP.

The VP3 supports AGP 2x Execute mode.

Look for non-Intel AGP motherboard sup-
port for VP3 from Tyan, EPoX, FIC, and others,
to hit the market hard in the first half of this
year. While some boards will give you 83MHz,
the VP3 runs into one major bottleneck— no
100MHz system-bus support.

VIA APOLLO MVP 3

You should have seen this one coming— the
Apollo MVP3 core-logic chipset adds 100MHz
system-bus support to the VP3 architecture.

To enable 100MHz capability, VIA developed
Virtual Clock Synchronization (VCS). A propri-
etary design, VCS employs Delay Lock Loop
(DLL) technology crucial to high-frequency
CPU, DRAM, and AGP buses in Slot 1 and
Socket 7 system designs.

The VIA Apollo MVP3 will be compatible
with all Socket 7 processors and throws in
support for 1GB of FP/EDO/SDRAM and DDR
SDRAM II memory, AGP lx and 2x, and the
ubiquitous 2MB of L2 cache. The MVPs should
be available later this year.

SIS 5571

Another favorite among : *** *?^ "mlt

the non-Intel clique, ■

SiS’s 5571 is considered
a 430TX killer. 512MB of
main memory is your tW ^ 00 ^"'^

INTEL 430 HX

Thanks to its deep-posting and FIFO buffers
and dual-CPU support, the 430HX (a.k.a.

Triton 2) was a favorite among those wanting
to concoct cheap NT servers. Originally con-
ceived for high-end applications and capable
of handling up to 512MB of EDO DRAM (fully
cachable via an external tag RAM, and 64MB
without), the 430HX is still used in dual-
Pentium motherboards by a variety of main-
board makers today. USB support and DMA
bus mastering made this an excellent single
CPU chipset as well. But the lack of SDRAM
support doomed it to a slow death.

INTEL 430V X

This chipset lived under the performance shad-
ow of the beefier 430HX. Aimed at the home
market, the 430VX is a single CPU solution
that can’t handle its bigger brother’s

copious amount of memory (max-
ing out at 128MB with 64MB
W cachable). So the only enhance-
ment the 430VX could muster was
SDRAM support.

INTEL 430TX

The last of Intel’s Socket 7 PCIsets, the
430TX fell dreadfully short. Despite features
such as SDRAM support, USB, Ultra DMA/ATA-
33, and MMX support, the 430TX was stymied
by the limit

Intel never officially supported

YOUR PERSONAL TECH

BRIEFING ON THE
CONCEPTS AND
COMPONENTS THAT MAKE
UP THE PC EXPERIENCE

That new K6 or Pentium II may be
the heart of your dream machine ,
but the core-logic chipset is its all-
powerful soul , taking care of all
those things that can make or break
your motherboard . Wanna roll with
100 MHz SDRAM and AGP? Go crazy
with USB? Fire up the latest , fastest
CPU? Your chipset had best be ready
to handle the madness .
— Andrew Sanchez

r/?e Core f-Og/c CJLijLSLRl Checklist

Chipset

CPU Supported

Maximum

RAM

Maximum
L2 Cache

RAM

Support

System-Bus

Speeds

Maximum

PCI-Bus

Speed

AGP

Support/

Level

USB

Support

#Of

CPUs

Supported

UltraDMA /
ATA-3
Support

Intel 430FX

Intel Pentium MMX,
AMD K5

128MB

51 2K

FP, EDO

66MHz, 50MHz

33MHz

NO

NO

1

NO

Intel 430HX

Intel Pentium MMX,
AMD K5.K6, Cyrix Ml

512MB

51 2K

FP, EDO

66MHz, 50MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

2*

NO

Intel 430VX

Intel Pentium MMX,
AMD K5,K6, Cyrix Ml

128MB

51 2K

FP, EDO,
SDRAM

66MHz, 50MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

NO

Intel 430TX

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5, K6,
Cyrix Ml, M2, IDTWinChip C6

256MB

51 2K

FP, EDO,
SDRAM

83MHz, 75MHz,
66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

YES

VIA VP2/97

Intel Pentium MMX,

AMD K5,K6, Cyrix Ml, M2

512MB

2MB

EDO, SDRAM

83MHz, 75MHz,
66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

YES

VIA VP3

Intel Pentium MMX,

AMD K5, K6, Cyrix Ml, M2

1GB

2MB

EDO, SDRAM

83MHz, 75MHz,
66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

1

YES

VIA MVP3

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5,K6,
K6+3D, K6 3D, Cyrix Ml, M2,
IDTWinChip C6

1GB

2MB

DDR-SDRAM,

SDRAM

100MHz, 83MHz,
75MHz, 66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

1

YES

SiS 5571

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5, K6,
Cyrix Ml, M2

512MB

51 2K

EDO, SDRAM

83MHz, 75MHz,
66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

NO

SiS 5581

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5, K6,
Cyrix Ml, M2

512MB

51 2K

EDO, SDRAM

83MHz, 75MHz,
66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

YES

SiS 5591

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5, K6,
Cyrix Ml, M2, IDTWinChip C6

768MB

1MB

EDO, SDRAM

100MHz, 83MHz,
75MHz, 66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

1

YES

OPTi Vendetta
82C750

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5,K6,
Cyrix Ml, M2

512MB

51 2K

EDO, SDRAM

66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

YES

AMD 640

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5,K6,
Cyrix Ml, M2

512MB

2MB

EDO, SDRAM

83MHz, 75MHz,
66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

YES

AMD 640 AGP

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5,K6,
K6+3D, K6 3D, Cyrix Ml, M2

512MB

2MB

DDR-SDRAM,

SDRAM

100MHz, 83MHz,
75MHz, 66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

1

YES

ALi Aladdin IV+

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5,K6,
Cyrix Ml , M2

1GB

1MB

EDO, SDRAM

83MHz, 75MHz,
66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

1

YES

ALi Aladdin V

Intel Pentium MMX, AMD K5, K6,
K6+3D, K6 3D, Cyrix Ml, M2,
IDTWinChip C6

1GB

1MB

DDR-SDRAM,

SDRAM

100MHz, 83MHz,
75MHz, 66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

1

YES

Intel 440FX

Pentium Pro, Pentium II Slot 1

1GB

dependent
on CPU

FP, EDO

66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

2

NO

Intel 450GX

Pentium Pro

1GB

dependent
on CPU

FP, EDO

66MHz

33MHz

NO

NO

2

NO

Intel 450KX

Pentium Pro

4GB
per pair

dependent
on CPU

FP, EDO

66MHz

33MHz

NO

NO

4

NO

Intel 440LX

Pentium II Slot 1

1GB EDO,
512MB

dependent
on CPU

EDO, SDRAM

66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

2

YES

Intel 440LX-R

Pentium II Slot 1

1GB**

dependent
on CPU

EDO, SDRAM

66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

1

YES

Intel 440BX

Pentium II Slot 1/Slot 2

1GB

dependent
on CPU

DDR-SDRAM,

SDRAM

100MHz, 66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

2

YES

Intel 450NX

Pentium II Slot 2

1GB

dependent
on CPU

DDR-SDRAM,

SDRAM

100MHz, 66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

4

YES

Micron Samurai

Pentium Pro, Pentium II Slot 1

1GB

dependent
on CPU

EDO, SDRAM

66MHz

66MHz

NO

YES

2

NO

Compaq HPSA

Pentium Pro, Pentium II Slot 1

3GB

dependent
on CPU

EDO, SDRAM

66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

2

NO

VIA VT82C680
Apollo 6

Pentium Pro/Pentium II Slot 1

1GB

dependent
on CPU

EDO, SDRAM

66MHz

33MHz

NO

YES

2

YES

SiS 5601

Pentium Pro/Pentium II Slot 1

>51 2MB

dependent
on CPU

EDO, SDRAM

66MHz

33MHz

YES/2X

YES

2

YES

Intel CPU only. **l

imited by DIMM. Some motherboards

armed with the SiS 5591 are

i marked with 100MHz system-bus speeds— it has yet to be determined whether the chipset supports it.

maximum (EDO or SDRAM), but 512K is all you but not much else. You’ll need to jump to the

get for L2 cache. While it does support USB,
don’t expect dual-CPU support, AGP, or Ultra
ATA. But it does support higher system-bus
speeds for Cyrix 6x86MX processors.

5591 series for AGP and all that cool stuff.

SIS 5581

This interim PCIset provides Ultra ATA support

SIS 5591/95 AGP

Sporting many of the features of the 5571 —
including 768MB of EDO or SDRAM main
memory, 1MB of L2 cache, and all those nifty
peripherals you love— the 5591 has caused a

minor dilemma regarding how fast can you
push the system bus. The official company
line is 66MHz, yet motherboard makers are
pushing that all the way up to 100MHz.

OPTI VENDETTA 82C750

A major casualty when Intel came stompin’
into the chipset market, OPTi has been eking

I

INTEL 440FX

Engineered for the
Pentium Pro and
recently the Pentium
II scene, the 440FX
is still the worksta-
tion workhorse. With
support for up to
1GB of EDO DRAM,
the 440 FX can handle up to two CPUs, USB,

promises over 1GB of memory bandwidth, to its
Dual Peer PCI bus controllers that allow an
aggregate I/O bandwidth of up to 267MB/sec,
this core-logic chipset is ready to handle all the
dual-processing nuances of a high-end server.

It doesn’t support AGP or a 66MHz PCI
bus, so future high-speed 3D graphics may be
compromised.

INTEL 440LX

The 440LX represents one
of Intel’s major feature-
rich chipset upgrades.

Throwing in full AGP sup-
port (as expected), the
440LX supports up to
1GB of system RAM
(512MB SDRAM or a full 1GB of EDO),
as well as all the major features such as Ultra
ATA, USB, and a host of power-saving features.

A big drawback is the 66MHz system-bus
limit, although some boards allow up to
83MHz. This is a P-ll specific chipset, so P-
Pro users are out of luck.

INTEL 440LX-R

Expected sometime later this year, the 440LX-R
will be a lower-cost version of the 440LX run-
ning at a 66MHz system bus. AGP is in full
effect, and the 440LX-R will probably be
launched alongside the cacheless P-ll proces-
sors. Motherboards will be limited to two
DIMM sockets, three PCI slots, one processor,
and no error-correction code (ECC), so expect
motherboard makers to embrace the new
Micro ATX formfactor for 440LX-R systems.

INTEL 440 BX

This is the beast everyone’s waiting for. With
a 66MHz or 100MHz system-bus speed, better
data buffering, and up to 1GB of RAM support,
the 440BX will be SDRAM (regular or DDR)
only, so chuck those EDO DRAM modules.
Single or dual Slot 1 or Slot 2 P-lls will be
supported.

With a refined, optimized AGP support in
tow, if you team up the 440BX with the forth-
coming PIIX6 Southbridge chip, you’ll also get
IEEE 1394 support and enhanced manageabili-
ty thrown in for good measure. (See preview
on p. 60)

INTEL 450 NX

Like the 450GX/KX before it, the 450NX is rele-
gated to quad processors, only this time it’ll
be for Slot 2 processors. This AGPset will
sport all the cool features of the 440BX.

SIS 5601

SiS’s 5601 is forthcoming, but if its sister
chipset, the 5602, gives any indication of
performance, we can expect support for at
least a 66MHz system bus, 512MB of EDO
or SDRAM, Ultra ATA, USB, and more. 0

Considering no one in his right mind has
attempted to clone the Pentium Pro proces-
sor, it’s no surprise Intel has almost absolute
rule in this 64-bit realm. But, lone patches of
resistance are out there.

and more. You can get bargain-basement
boards based on this chipset for P-ll systems,
but it would be a waste. P-Pro owners, howev-
er, can still get these in droves.

INTEL 450GX/KX

Basically the 440FX with
enhanced abilities, the 450GX
supports dual-
Pentium Pro configs, while
440K, when installed
dual PCI bridges (PB) and
memory controllers (MC), is for quad-P-
Pro action. Designed for mondo workstations
and servers, they rarely make appearances in
consumer motherboards. The 450GX supports
up to 1GB of EDO DRAM, while the 450KX
handles a hernia-inducing 4GB of RAM per
PB/MB combo. This old P- Pro-specific chipset
supports the failed EISA bus.

VIA VT82C680 APOLLO 6

From those wacky folks at VIA comes this
Pentium Pro/Pentium ll-compatible chipset,
the VT82C680 Apollo 6. Capable of handling
up to 1GB of RAM, the Apollo 6 one-ups the
440FX by supporting SDRAM (as well as EDO
DRAM) and Ultra DMA/ATA-33. The Apollo 6
can get a motherboard going with up to four
P-Pro CPUs, but it’s still unclear whether any-
one can set up a P-ll-based system with this
chipset. As expected, AGP is a major missing
component.

MICRON SAMURAI

Concocted in-house by Micron Electronics, the
dual-CPU-capable Samurai PCIset handles up
to a whopping 1GB of EDO or SDRAM and is
the only core-logic chipset that supports a 64-
bit PCI bus running at 66MFIz (everyone else is
chugging along at 33MFlz). USB is also sup-
ported, but not Ultra ATA.

At home with either a Pentium Pro or P-ll
CPU, the Samurai’s only weakness is its lack
of AGP support; but the 66MFIz PCI bus
should keep naysayers quiet when massive
15MB+ textures come rolling its way. The only
way you’ll get this chipset is through Micron
and its S18693 PTSAM dual-Pentium II ATX
motherboard.

COMPAQ’S HIGHLY
PARALLEL SYSTEM
ARCHITECTURE

Designed by Reliance Computers, the Highly
Parallel System Architecture is a core-logic
chipset found only in Compaq’s workstations.
The FI PSA is aimed specifically at hardcore
server applications, handling up to 3GB of
EDO or SDRAM! Quad P-Pro or dual— P-lls are
its calling, and it can handle USB with ease.
While it doesn’t support Ultra ATA, this
chipset is suited for a SCSI lifestyle.

From its dual memory processing that

SOCKET 8/SLOT 1
PCISETS/AGPSET

out a living providing chipsets for overseas
notebooks and desktop systems. The single-
chip-solution Vendetta 82C750 offers up to
512MB of system memory (SIMM or DIMM), as
well as USB and Ultra ATA support. But, with
512K of L2 cache and no AGP support, the
Vendetta is feature limited.

AMD 640

With VIA as a close partner, AMD has its
own core-logic chipset. The AMD 640 PCIset
follows many of the features of the VP2,
including SDRAM support, 512MB of main
memory (all of it cachable), 2MB of L2
cache, Ultra ATA, and USB. System-bus
speeds are officially set at 66MHz, but
expect a lOOMFIz AGP-compliant part to
appear when the K6 3D and K6+3D proces-
sors hit.

ALI ALADDIN IV+

A product of Acer Laboratories, the Aladdin
IV+ handles bus speeds up to 83MHz, as well
as 1GB of RAM (EDO or SDRAM and 512MB
cachable via tag RAM). The 1MB maximum L2
cache size impresses, while Ultra ATA and USB
are supported as well. The only thing lacking
is AGP support, but the Aladdin V takes care
of that.

ALI ALADDIN V

Recently announced and heading to a
motherboard near you is the mega-fast
Aladdin V. Building on the Aladdin IV+ PCIset
feature set, Aladdin V will bypass the first-gen
66MFIz AGP bus speeds and sport a 100MHz
system-bus speed and full AGP 2x support.
Pump in up to 1GB of SDRAM (all fully
cachable), and expect board makers to pop in
as much as 1MB of L2 cache. Ultra ATA and
USB are also in effect.

Abit has announced plans for its IT5A
Aladdin V-based motherboard— expect more
to follow.

54 boot APR 98

Handy Andy’s

This month, senior editor

Andrew Sanchez

goes solo and wields his
nwgic mojo on all the
uppity hardware parts

in the known universe.

Did You Sell Me Bad X?

I ran the 3D tests featured on bootDisc 17. Final
Reality ran fine, but X ran terribly. The frame
rate was excellent, but there were lots of white
blocks where video should have been. I was
using Diamond’s Viper V330. What’s wrong?

DrOctane

You need to do two things. First, get the latest
Viper V330 drivers from www.diamondmm.com.
Second, try going into X's graphics settings and
making some adjustments. Press Fll and then click
OK. Now you'll see the Graphics Setting menu. Go
to the Transp. texture format pulldown menu in
the upper right-hand comer and switch between the
various texture formats. Change one, then click OK
and check your output. You may need to fiddle
with this, and maybe even your “Normal texture
format" setting, before you settle on an optimal set-
ting. Take a peek at www.egosoft.com for
more information and possible setting recom-
mendations for your particular video card.

require 4MB of local video
memory for both Z-buffer
and texture-storage duties.
With only 2MB of video
memory, many games will
refuse to run. And even if
the game decides to run, it
will drop textures like mad.
We saw this happen with
the Packard Bell 233MMX
machine, which had an
ATI Rage with only 2MB
of memory.

Who Is The Boss Of Whom?

I have two hard drives: an old Connor 420MB
and a newer Maxtor 2GB. Currently the Connor
is the master, with the Maxtor as the slave on the
same ribbon going into the primary controller.
The Conner is the master because it was there
first and contains Windows 95. Should I change
this? Would I get improved performance?

Michael Couillard

Change it. Subjugate the old, slow-as-a-slug
Conner drive. By keeping it as your master and as
your OS drive, you're dragging your computer
through the mud. Use utility software such as
Drivelmage or DriveCopy to help you move
everything over. Once you make the switch, your
system will be noticeably faster booting up and
overall performance will be mucho better.

Internal/External Modem
Mix-N-Match

I’m currently beta-testing Windows 98 and
want to add a second 56 Kbps modem to try
binding. Problem is, I’m out of ISA slots.

Will I suffer a performance hit by using an
external modem? I’ve never used an external,
and I don’t know if performance suffers by
going through a serial port rather than an
expansion slot. What do you think?

Mark A. Hiatt

Assuming you have the free IRQs and resources
available, and your comm ports use a 16550
UART, you shouldn't see any performance hits
(the modem itself is a bigger I/O bottleneck than
the serial port). The biggest thing in your way,
quite honestly, is IRQ availability.

Video Memory: Resolution Or

Performance?

If I have two nearly identical video cards, but
one has 2MB of video memory and the other
has 4MB, will I see a difference in perform-
ance at 640x480/16-bit color? Or is video
memory only used for greater color depths at
higher resolutions?

Steve Alvarado

You'll definitely see a performance difference. By
limiting your video memory to 2MB, you'll not only
limit yourself to lower resolutions, but you'll also
slight your 3D gaming hardcore. Many games

tly beta-testing Windows
98, and I want to add a second
56Kbps modem to try binding.
Problem is, I’m out of ISA slots. ” :

MPEG card on an S-video cable, but if I switch
to the Viper, I can’t see a thing. Just lots of flip-
ping images of my desktop (or the movie) on
the TV screen. I’ve tried forcing Windows 95
to put out at 60Hz, but it makes no difference.
Isn’t it supposed to be easier than this?

Josh Criz

The Diamond Viper V330 is notorious for
mediocre TV-out. Make sure you have the latest
drivers and see if any special TV-out options need
to be enabled. Setting your refresh rate to 60 Hz
or slower should make things easier for your TV,
but if this doesn't work, go with the MPEG -2
decoder's output — you'll be happier.

Down And Out

What are the consequences of just turning off
your computer and not going to “Shut Down”?

Harold

The biggest consequence — besides the fact that
Win95 won't have any way of warning you to
save any important work — is that your hard drive
heads won't be properly “parked." By not locking
down those hard drive heads into that special
safety position, you run the risk of losing data if
you move your computer around. Those heads
will be bouncing around your platters, and if they
hit a platter hard enough, data loss can occur.

Hard And Fast?

If I used the DMA setting on my hard drive
under Win95, would I see a speed increase?

I used it for the CD-ROM and noticed a
50% increase in speed. Would using the
DMA settings on my hard drive slow
down the processor or hog memory?

Constantine Krikos

What A Difference A File Makes

My AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS are
just about empty, save the CD-ROM drivers.
What do you need in the AUTOEXEC.BAT and
CONFIG.SYS in a strictly Win95 machine? Do
these files serve a purpose anymore?

John Bellavigna

Many Windows-based products still rely on some
AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS settings for
optimal operation. For example, if you own a 3Dfx
Voodoo board, you'll see AUTOEXEC.BAT com-
mands designating variables such as clock speed and
refresh rate, as well as gamma correction. And
many soundcards still initialize via your startup
files. Other things, such as HIMEM.SYS, are still
required by Win95 in order to boot properly. Even
little things, such as the “set" command, can have
repercussions within your Win95 world. Isn't back-
ward compatibility grand?

TV-Out On The Outs

I have a DVD player with an MPEG-2 decoder
card and a Diamond Viper V330 PCI card. Both
work great where the computer monitor is con-
cerned, but TV-out is a different story. My DVD
movies show up fine coming directly from the

Enabling DMA will result in lower CPU uti-
lization, thus freeing up your processor to do
more important things. In theory, you should notice
a speed increase with file transfers. The best way to
check is to benchmark your hard drive and time
how long it takes to copy to and from your drive.

BIOS Biopsy

I’m having problems with updating my BIOS.
My Pentium 100 has a Chain-tech motherboard
with an Award BIOS. My system refuses to
allow me to install the update because of a lack
of memory. Also, when I use memmaker, I get
a QEMM error. Any suggestions?

Eric Arnold

The best way to ensure those wacky flash BIOS
programs work is to make a floppy boot disk con-
sisting of only your HIMEM.SYS inside your
CONFIG.SYS file. Do not add anything that will
encroach on base memory, such as FILES= or
B UFFERS= commands. This should allow the
flash BIOS program to work its magic. If not,
edit your boot disk so that it contains absolutely
nothing. Then try it again. Remember to always
clear your BIOS (via jumpers) to make sure no
residual madness is left by the older BIOS. You'll
need to go back in and re-adjust your settings for
your particular system optimization. 0

EACH MONTH, BOOT EDITORS
GATHER THE BEST PRODUCTS
IN A SPECIFIC CATEGORY AND
DEEM THEM: BOOTWORTHY

Faster is better. We're always looking for the
next fix, whether it's for CPUs, RAM, hard

drives, CD-ROMs, or especially modems. When
you’re browsing the net, it doesn’t matter how
blazingly fast your new Pentium II chip is if your
Internet access is limited by the crappy connec-
tion to your ISP.

Modems are the
weakest link in the
chain. They inhibit
you from getting
your data injection,
your updated
driver, your alt. binaries
.erotica, desktops news-
feed—now!

All this is rapidly changing,
and it's about freakin' time. We
can hardly wait for the day when
Internet access will be as seamless

Zoom FaxModem 56Kx

There’s something to be said for external modems: status lights! It’s reassuring when the little blinking
light indicates something is happening. And this little guy has no less than 14 LEDs. One potentially cool
feature is that Plug-n-Play can be disabled on the internal version and the modem assigned
up to COM8 — great for alternate operating systems or for anyone who needs a bit more
control. Bundled with the seven-year warranty and flash-memory upgradability is
Communicate! Lite software. Distinctive Ring routing and ZoomGuard lightning
protection are also standard features. Videophone-ready, it supports ITU H.324-
compliant software and the V.80 video standard, assuming you have the
appropriate AA I hardware already. The internal speaker is a much
appreciated addition.

WE DIG
THOSE
K56, FAX ,
AND MSG
LIGHTS.

product info

Price $169

Company Zoom Telephonies
Phone 800.631.3116
URL www. zoom
tel.com/k56/56k.html

and instantaneous as your local hard
drive. But until then, well continue to be your
pusher and keep dealing to you (for the price of
a single issue of boot) all the juice you need to

Global Village PC Card 56Kflex
Modem/Fax/1 OBase-T Ethernet

make an educated decision about what modem
technologies to inject your PC with.

The only Kick Ass award boot has bestowed upon a modem
was for another Global Village modem in boot 8, so it’s a
good bet that this micro powerhouse performs. Of course
it’s flash upgradable; of course it uses K56flex technology;
of course it’s a dual-port solution that allows you to use the
modem and network simultaneously. But did you know it’s
for wireless communications? The smartly
plug will detach itself under stress (and we don’t
the kind that

boot editors face) to
prevent damage to the
and your notebook.
As if that weren’t
enough protection, it has
built-in electrical and
line-surge protection.

product info

Price $299

Company Global Village
Phone 800.736.4821
URL www.globalvillage.com

THE CABLE CONNECTOR LOOPS BACK UPON ITSELF
SEALING THE FEMALE JACKS TO PREVENT DUST
AND DEBRIS FROM CONTAMINATING THE INSIDES.

VrVVflVIiTfli vl

TO MAKE THOSE
INTERNET CALLS
CLEARER AND MORE
PRIVATE, A HEADSET/
MIKE IS INCLUDED.

Jaton Explorer 56
Internal 56Kbps X2
DSV D/Voice/Fax

The Explorer 56 is the only X2-compliant modem in this roundup, mainly
because K56flex seems to be the “standard” many manufacturers are using
despite the fact that most of the world’s larger ISPs are deploying X2 technology
(AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy included). The Explorer 56 by Jaton uses Cirrus
Logic’s FastPath 56K CL-MD565X ARM RISC chipset. It supports flash BIOS and
caller ID, as well as the V.80 standard video-conferencing spec, and this partic-
ular model incorporates V.70 DSVD thanks to the CL-MD5650D echo cancella-
tion subsystem. As with the Zoom modem, the PnP feature can be disabled to
manually set the standard COM1 -4 and the IRQs typically associated with them.
Bundled is the robust BitWare by Cheyenne.

product info

Price $129
Company Jaton
Phone 408.934.9369
URL www.jaton.com

If the words modem and Ethernet are a requirement for your PC card considera-
tion, this hot swappable PnP Type II bad boy from Multi-Tech should find itself
at the top of your list. To address the first part of the criteria, K56flex tech-
nology ensures the top-speed performance you’ve come to expect on
your desktop. While 10Mbps lOBase-T Ethernet connectivity allows for
seamless integration with LANs. NE2000 compatibility is supported,
as well as Windows 95/NT/3.1 , OS/2 Warp, and Novell. Both sides
are operable concurrently. The 5-foot Y-cable has manly RJ-45 and
RJ-11 connectors, so no pesky bridging cables are required to get
jacked in wherever you might find

yourself. A comprehensive and
detailed manual explains most
every facet of the card— some-
thing severely lacking in many
other vendors’ products — and
Trio Communication Suite
5.0 are also included.

product info

Price $385
Company Multi-Tech
Phone 800.328.9717
URL www.multitech.com

SIMULTANEOUS ■
MODEM/LAN
OPERATION PLUS
A PROFESSIONAL
PACKAGE— WHAT
MORE CAN WE
ASK FOR?

Multi-Tech MultiMobile
MT5634ZLX/E K56Flex
Modem+Ethernet PC Card

APR 98 boot 57

Boca 112K
DynamicDuo
Internal
K56flex
Data /Fax SVD

Boca’s full-length PnP ISA card might be just the
intermediate step between a standard modem and
an ISDN line for those too chicken to take the plunge.

After installing MidCore Software’s MidPoint Teamer ; it’s
possible to take advantage of the 1 1 2K load balancing
feature. For ISPs that don’t support K56flex yet, a transfer
rate of 67K isn’t too shabby. The modem will work with
either a single RJ-1 4 wall jack wired for two telephone lines,
or two physical RJ-1 1 jacks. In either case, the lines must
have independent phone numbers. In the later case, a splitter
and coupler will be required. Also, an ISP that allows two
logins or two Internet accounts is required as well.

Some programs, such as the included Microsoft
NetMeeting 2.0 , will need to be “Socksified” using
SocksCap32, a SOCKS protocol created by NEC.

SOCKS establishes a secure proxy data channel between
two computers in a client/server environment. From the client’s
perspective, SOCKS is transparent. From the server’s perspec-
tive, SOCKS is a client. If one of the lines has caller ID, it will
detect the incoming call and drop one connection to allow the
call to proceed, when the call has ended, the modem will auto-
matically redial the ISP number, reestablishing the high-speed
connection. Boca is offering a free upgrade to the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU) 56K standard when available.

W. ba tLsunf.ith two competing. standards?.

The short answer is that, finally, after over a year of competition between Rockwell/
Lucent’s K56flex and US Robotic’s X2 for the 56Kbps bandwidth specification, the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is near completion on the ITU-T’s
“V.PCM” (official name pending) standard. Basically it takes the best of both stan-
dards, alleviating the worry in purchasing a 56K modem. Most modems with
flash BIOS can easily be upgraded to the new standard with soft-
ware, which should be available by the time you read this.

And what’s this smack about 56K-hyped modems not
being able to reach 56Kbps? Well, when the technology
was in its infancy, the theoretical limit was 62Kbps. Of
course, these ideal conditions couldn’t realistically be
met The companies speculated that 56K would be the
real-world speed, and thus the marketing began.
Low and behold, the FCC stepped in and tested,
which resulted in a maximum approval rating
for 53.3Kbps, after line voltages, distances,
and such were calculated.

For more detailed information, white
papers, and charts, point your
browser to www.k56flex.com
or x2.usr.com.

product info

Price $279

Company Boca Research
Phone 561.997.6227
URL www.bocaresearch.com

NOTICE THAT THERE IS ONLY A
SINGLE TELEPHONE LINE-IN
AND NOT DUAL JACKS, AS ONE
MIGHT EXPECT.

Eicon DIVA T/A ISDN

USING AO/DI AND THRESHOLDS ,
THE DIVA T/A PROBABLY WON’T
HAVE BOTH B-CHANNELS PEGGED .

Eicon Technology’s DIVA T/A ISDN modem is the first of its kind to sup-
port Auto-SPID and Auto-Switch detection for simpler installation, as well
as AO/DI (Always On/Dynamic ISDN) to reduce online tariff charges. The
modem has a throughput of 128Kbps when bonding both B-channels and
up to 512Kbps using onboard RFC Compression Control Protocol with Hi/Fn
Stacker LZS, Microsoft MPPC, and Ascend compression.

AO/DI essentially saves mucho dinero by automatically toggling the B-channels as needed, while
keeping the (free) 9600 baud D-channel active, via user-configurable thresholds. This bandwidth-on-demand
allows you to stay online longer, avoiding the per-minute charges, as most users are not utilizing the full
channel for a constant duration, but rather “bursting” data in chunks. Data Over Voice allows a 56Kbps con-
nection using the voice channel for toll-free Internet access where ISPs support it. Should a voice call come in
while you’re online, one of the channels will suspend, allowing the call to go through anil automatically
resuming upon completion. PnP operation, as well as flash memory firmware upgrades, make this one of the
easiest packages to install.

Included with any standard EZ-ISDN 1 package is caller ID,
three-way conference calling, and call transfer, easily making
ISDN cheaper than purchasing two analog phone lines. A toll-free
number has been set up to aid ordering, thereby detangling the
confusion many consumers face when dealing with their local
phone company, covering everything from ordering the line and
scheduling the installation to finding an ISP.

product info

Price $249

Company Eicon Technolgies
Phone 800.803.4266
URL www.eicon.com

58 boot APR 98

New World Technologies, Inc.
110 Greene Street, #5100
New York, New York 10012
Tel. 212 941 4633 Fax 212 274 8527
E-mail psion@nwt.com
CompuServe 10112,2431

WORLD

COMPUTERS

SERIES 5-incl. PC Link

Value Offer-$50 rebate on S5 until 6/30/98

Psion Series5-8IVlb find. $50 Rebate

) $499

Psion Serles5-4Mb (incl. $50 Rebate

) $399

SERIES 3c

Psion S3c-2Mb

$299

Psion S3c-1Mb

$249

SIENA

Siena 1Mb

$199

PSION MODEMS

Universal Travel Modem

$129

PC Card Modem Adapter (req.

PC Card Modem) $139.99

PC Card Modems 33.6 to 56k

call

PRINTING ACCESSORIES

Printer Cables

$45

Citizen PN60I Infrared Printer

$375

Infrared Printer Adapter

$149

PERIPHERALS & ACCESSORIES 1

MEMORY DISKS

NWT Memory Card- 8Mb (S5)

$159

Psion Memory Disk- 10Mb (S5)

$199

NWT Memory Card- 15Mb (S5)

$249

NWT Memory Card- 30Mb (S5)

$479

1Mb S3 Flash Memory Disk

$120

2Mb S3 Flash Memory Disk

$170

4Mb S3 Flash Memory Disk

$289

CONNECTIVITY

Mac Connect-S5

$99

PsiMac-S3 (software & cable)

$100

PsiWin-S3 (software & cable)

$79

Synchronizer for Siena

$39.99

CASES

Alpana Bawa Pouch

$50

Zip & Flip Cases

$45

Psion Leather Glove

$39

Executive Slim Leather Wallet

$49

Zip & Card Case (PC card adapter)

$75

Zip & Fax Case (Universal Travel Modem) $75

ACCESSORIES

S5 AC Adapter

$29

S3 AC Adapter

$20

Psion Desk Stand

$35

Reference Guides

$39

Duo Pen (ink & stylus pen in one)

$18

SOFTWARE

SOFTWARE FOR S5

Allegro Handwriting Recognition

$59

Chess-S5

$79

Backgammon-S5

$79

Enroute-S5 (Road Atlas)

$79

Dictionary-S5 German/French/English $79

Expense Manager-S5

$79

Financial Calculator-S5

$79

Berlitz Phrase Book-S5

$69

Presentation Maker-S5

$79

Monopoly-S5

$79

5 Pack (games)

$69

Psion Games Arcade-S5

$49

Diary Companion-S5

$20

SOFTWARE FOR S3

World Travel companion-S3

$54

PsiMail lnternet-S3

$59.99

Dataview Pro (mail & labels)-S3

$59

Expense Tracker-S3

$50

Automap Road Atlas-S3

$95

ACT! (Symantec)-S3

$99

Berlitz Phrase Book-S3

$95

Scrabble-S3

$95

our price is best or we match it

bl mwm

Free E-Mail Software on our Website

■

niJMIHIH

Intel 440BX AGPset

Breaking The 66MHz Speed Limit

1998 will be the Year Of
Deschutes, at least, accord-
ing to Intel. Bumping
processor speeds up to
450MHz and slapping in larger L2 caches,
Intel is breaking barriers all over the
place, and the 440BX core-logic AGPset
tears down one of the last bastions of
Intel-specific bottlenecks.

With the 440BX AGPset comes that
much-anticipated 100MHz system bus— the
one major bottleneck that plagued the older
440LX. For those who missed our massive
Deschutes blowout last month, here’s a
rundown of the 440BX’s specifications.

Supporting either single- or dual-
66MHz-system-bus-based Slot 1 Pentium
II processors (233MHz
through 333MHz) or
lOOMHz-system-bus Slot 1
or Slot 2 CPUs (350MHz,

400MHz, and conceivably
450MHz), the 440BX han-
dles up to 1GB of system
memory— all of it each-
able. Unless you plan on
staying with a 66MHz sys-
tem-bus CPU (where EDO
works best), you should
opt for 100MHz SDRAM for
maximum performance.

The 440BX core-logic chip,
an engineering sample, was
marked to ward off curious
benchmarkers — like bootBoyz.

USB, PCI Level 2.1 bus-mastering
compliance, Ultra DMA/ATA-33
device support, and PIO mode 4
ensures all your favorite devices
are taken care of. A wealth of
power-saving features also
comes packed in the 440BX,
following strict ACPI and OS
Directed Power Management as
well as EPA Mod 2.0 compliance.

You can now keep track of CPU
temperature, core voltage, and
more, with a little Win95 helper
app floating in the background.

There will be two flavors of 440BX ship-
ping: The first wave of AGPsets will be
coupled with an enhanced PIIX4E

Southbridge chip. Later this year
the PIIX6 Southbridge chip will
be matched with the 440BX to
grant you with IEEE 1394 I/O
ports and up to four USB ports.

Judging from the performance
results, we can safety say that
the 100MHz system bus does
make a pretty hefty impact on
performance— for the better.

With a P-ll 300MHz CPU and a
P-ll 350MHz engineering sample,
we proceeded to go mad with
benchmarking flava. But before

Do

accept anything
than five PCI slots for y
440BX motherboard. With a
some boards will have even more!

you 66MHz-bound bootH
sexy ideas about plopping in your
CPU and overclocking it to 100MHz, you’d
better check yourself lest you wreck your-
self. With this particular motherboard’s
soft-jumper system, the BIOS automatically
senses what type of CPU you have and
gives you the appropriate CPU speed set-
tings. Trust us— we tried. It remains to be
seen whether jumper/DIP switch-based
boards will offer the same roadblocks, but
unless some mainboard makers get a little
crazy with bus speed settings, expect the
dichotomous choices of 66MHz or 100MHz
with any board you see.

The 350MHz CPU easily overclocked to
400MHz and it coughed up even faster
scores without breaking a sweat. The CPU

DirectX 6

Say hello to two new APIs and a revised Direct3D

Recently, Microsoft had a happy little
DirectX 6 coming out party at Meltdown
98, revealing plans for two new APIs,
DirectMusic, and DirectShow, along with
reinforcement plans for Direct3D.

But the most significant (and possibly
smartest) thing announced was that
Microsoft will build DirectX completely into
NT 5. There’s no release date set for the
new version of NT, but DirectX 6 is slated
for Q4 1998. Microsoft also announced that
if DirectX 6 was not ready in time for
Windows 98, a service pack would include
it, along with support for Windows 95.

DirectMusic was created to deal with the
shortcomings of existing audio technologies.
The offending technologies include: MIDI,
which tops out at 127 instruments and
plays back inconsistently; redbook audio,

which can’t synchronize with video and
needs to be premixed and recorded; and
digital audio, which is a resource hog and
also needs to be premixed, digital audio, in
fact, needs to be copied to the hard drive
for adequate playback, making for gigantic
game installations.

DirectMusic overcomes all these hurdles
by offering developers two key benefits: a
software synthesizer that consistently plays
back on all systems, and DLS support that
allows for custom instruments and triggered
sound effects through MIDI. DirectMusic
also allows for an unlimited number of
instruments and effects, as well as a master
clock that ensures music-video synchroniza-
tion is exact. But DirectMusic’s most power-
ful feature is its ability to compose music in
realtime. Imagine redbook audio tracks that

boot's Saint Alex St. John poses with Kevin Bachus, the
Product Manager of DirectX from Microsoft. Alex got his
head shaved for his birthday, which is on the first day of
Meltdown. Coincidence. . . we think not.

segue seamlessly according to specific
game events. High-quality audio would pro-
vide key transitions in mood, tempo, and
intensity with minimal CPU overhead.

DirectShow replaces ActiveMovie. The
new API is object-oriented and will support
all older content, replacing technologies
such as the 16-bit Media Control Interface
(MCI), which lacks support for new tech-
nologies such as DVD and Digital Broadcast
Satellite (DBS). Expect better movies from
games that use DirectShow.

REVIEWS

B_&juLlunjLiJuji4 B^sjlLLs

CPU/System Bus Speed

P-ll 300/66

P-ll 350/100

P-ll 400/100

bootMark

143

168

192

Final Reality AGP Test

20MB textures

112.03fps

1 30.4fps

1 45.31 fps

1 6MB textures

122.34fps

143.07fps

161.33fps

ForsakenMark (640x480)

52.1 8fps

56.24fps

56.46fps

DOS Quake (640x480)

31 .8fps

38.0fps

42.7fps

MDK PerfTest vl.4

117

141

163

Memory Speed (MB/sec)

111.1

140.8

159.5

L2 Cache Speed (MB/sec)

314.5

326.7

373.4

Bold indicates better performance

Note: These results were taken from a production sample and are here to give
examples of possible performance increases. Expect optimizations to occur
before final product is released.

System Configuration: CPU: Intel P-ll 300MHz and Intel P-ll 350MHz; 0/S:

Windows 95 OSR 2. 1 Build 1212b; Video Card: Real3D Starfighter AGP (8MB);

runs cool under all circumstances (thanks in
large part to the smaller .25-micron fab).
Under the proverbial floating-point-pushing,
unaccelerated Quake , the 400MHz CPU
pumped an awesome lOfps faster than the
300MHz part, while the integer-intensive
bootMark showed equally impressive
increases. But the big performance boost,

DirectShow (which will be built into
Internet Explore i) also supports digital
audio/video capture and playback, video
editing, DVD playback, and a streaming
API. DVD playback includes support for
MPEG-2, AC-3 audio, UDF file system, and
a copyright protection scheme. This gives
developers the tools to create games
based on DVD content. We’re also talking
DVD movie/game hybrids that use scenes
from the movies for game backgrounds
and textures— without a hit to the CPU.

Direct3D may not be a new API, but
most developers believe it needs a facelift.
Improvements include a new reference
rasterizer that should enhance performance
and make it easier to introduce new 3D
features that will inevitably crop up in new
hardware. There is also new support for
multitexturing (no more repetitive wall tex-
tures!), stencil planes, vertex buffers, and
new texture compression (provided by S3).
An optimized geometry pipeline should
further enhance performance. Finally, bump-
mapping support is included, offering

as expected, comes
in AGP performance
and memory speed.
While the 300MHz
part was able to
come up with
lllMB/sec data
transfer rates, the
350MHz and
400MHz pushed at
least 40MB/sec
faster memory
throughput, with the
400MHZ pushing
close to 160MB/sec.
AGP performance is
equally enhanced,
with speed increases
bumping up 33fps
past the 66MHz-bound 300MHz part.

As more and more 440BX boards
become available, you can bet that
we’ll be there, benchmarking away
and givin’ you the skinny on what
rocks and what sucks. At last, at
least for Intel, the 66MHz bottleneck
has been banished forever.

—Andrew Sanchez

product info

Available Q2 1998
Price TBA
Company Intel
Phone 800.628.8686
URL www.intel.com

developers the ability to add depth to
objects. This means an end to inappropri-
ately smooth surfaces (hey, if it’s a rocky
wall, it should have rocks jutting out).

Microsoft also hinted at the future
Fahrenheit API. A collaborative effort
from Microsoft, Silicon Graphics,
Hewlett-Packard, and Intel, it wraps
OpenGL into DirectX. It appears to be
targeted at the high-end workstation
arena for CAD, 3D modeling, and render-
ing software. If you’re expecting
Microsoft to replace Direct3D with
OpenGL, don’t hold your breath.

—Sean Cleveland

product info

Available Q4 1998
Price TBA

Company Microsoft
Phone 425.635.7000
URL www.microsoft.com/directx

HARDWARE ON THE HORIZON
AND SOFTWARE SOON TO SHIP

Intel 440BX AGPset 60

DirectX 6 60

Cirrus Logic MediaMax 62

The 10th Planet 64

The boot Tracking Sheet

TITLE DEVELOPER DATE

VIA Apollo MVP3 AGPset VIA Apr-98

AMD K6 300MHz AMD Apr-98

Half-Life Sierra Online Apr-98

Battlezone Activision Apr-98

Falcon 4.0 Microprose Apr-98

Red Line Racer Criterion/Ubi Soft Apr-98

Trespasser DreamWorks Apr-98

Baseball 3D Microsoft Apr-98

The Dark Project Looking Glass Technologies Apr-98

Anarchy Microsoft Apr-98

F22 Total Air War DID/Ocean Inti. Apr-98

Ultim@te Race Pro Kalisto/Microprose Apr-98

Redline Beyond Games/Accolade Apr-98

440BX AGPset Intel 02/98

K6 3D AMD Q2/98

5591 Socket 7 AGPset SiS Q2/98

Requiem 3DO/Cyclone Studios 02/98

Extreme Warfare Trilobyte/Red Orb Q2/98

Grand Prix Legends Papyrus/Sierra Online 02/98

Reno Air Racing Papyrus/Sierra Online Q2/98

MechCommander Microprose 02/98

The Dark Project Eidos/Looking Glass Q2/98

Riot Microsoft 02/98

Grim Fandango LucasArts 02/98

Dark Vengeance Reality Bytes 02/98

Descent: Free Space Interplay/Volition Q2/98

Cayenne 266Mhz Cyrix 03/98

Pentium 11/Slot 2 Intel Q3/98

440NX AGPset Intel Q3/98

440LX-R AGPset Intel 03/98

440NX AGPset/w PI 1X6 Intel Q3/98

Pentium II OK cache Intel 03/98

Kings Quest: Mask of Eternity Sierra Q3/98

10th Planet Bethesda Q3/98

Messiah Shiny/Interplay Q3/98

Windows 98/Memphis Microsoft Q3/98

Duke Nukem Forever 3D Realms Q3/98

Star Trek: Klingon

Honor Guard Microprose Q3/98

Descent III Interplay/Outrage Ent. Q4/98

Prey 3D Realms Q4/98

Shooter ION Storm Q4/98

Starship Troopers Microprose Q4/98

Windows NT 5.0 Microsoft Q4/98

K6+3D AMD 04/98

Katmai Intel Q4/98

*These dates are subject to change
**Bo!d indicates hardware

APR 98 boot 61

Cirrus Logic MediaMax

A PC with a twist

A couple of years ago, devices combining
PCs with traditional TVs were touted as
the “next big thing.” Companies big
(Gateway 2000, Compaq) and small
(WebTV, NetPC) jumped on the band-
wagon, only to find the market untested,
untried, and for the most part very
immature. If the problem wasn’t cost
(Gateway’s Destination was $5,000+), it
was lousy execution (WebTV just plain
sucked). Enter Cirrus Logic. By combining
its resources and experience in silicon,
sound, motherboards, and system integra-
tion, the company hopes to legitimize
both the low-cost PC and convergence
markets with its latest, the MediaMax.

First of all, MediaMax is a reference
design only, so before you hit your local
superstore, don’t. You won’t find it.
However, Cirrus Logic is courting various
OEMs (none were announced at press
time) and assures us products based
on this design will be available this
summer, from both PC and personal-
electronics manufacturers. Given that
the average DVD-player costs around
$600 to $700 these days, the MediaMax
is an intriguing blend of traditional PC
and home-entertainment components.

The software show, in this case a virtual remote, is only
for demonstration purposes.

It’ll be up to system OEMs to develop unique and pro-
prietary interfaces and controls.

r *

/ /•/

The rear panel is also chock-full of ports and
plug-ins.

As you can see in
this exclusive first
look, the current
design resembles
a VCR, but it’ll be
up to the OEMs to
determine the actual aes-
thetics, design, and dimen
sions. This first-rev
reference design is
also a closed box,
meaning you’ll be
restricted from
poking around
inside (but
OEMs can elect

for some level of upgradability).

The entire unit can be modified to
resemble a desktop PC, and the proprietary
motherboard can be swapped out for a
more traditional NLX or
ATX form factor.

Considering the
system’s price, the
guts are impressive.

The box we saw
housed an AMD
166MHz processor,
but Cirrus Logic
expects the speeds
to be bumped up to
233MHz and maybe
266MHz by the time
it actually starts
shipping. Better yet,
because the mother-
board is Socket 7
compliant, there’s
no reason an OEM
couldn’t migrate to
something even faster,
such as AMD’s enticing K6+3D. And
although the current design houses only
one 32MB DIMM, future designs will
support two SIMMs for a total of 64MB.

The MediaMax is primed for Win98’s
Auto-On feature and will include a second-
gen DVD-ROM drive along with hardware
MPEG decoding. Cirrus Logic is integrating
its own TV-tuner card— code-named
Revolution— that will include various signal
ins and outs, support for Macrovision
copy protection and closed captioning,
a five-tap filter for flicker-free processing.
Maximum screen resolution will be
800x600. 2D and 3D video will be handled
by an AGP-class Laguna 3D.

Cirrus Logic emphasizes sound process-
ing, so it has turned to its subsidiary,

The front panel pops open to reveal integrated USB
and Firewire ports.

As expected, the MediaMax will include an IR keyboard.

A remote, a la Gateway’s Destination, is also a possibility.

Crystal Semiconductor,
for SoundFusion, a
Dolby AC-3, Pro Logic,
and Aureal-compatible
PCI audio accelerator.
It’s a RAM-based
DSP— the sounds are
stored on your hard
drive— and provides
support for DLS 1.0,

3D virtualization, and
HRTF-based 3D sound.

For communication,
MediaMax will inte-
grate an X2-compatible
controllerless modem
chipset, a speaker-
phone, and an infrared
port. USB and IEEE
1394 ports are posi-
tioned on both the front and rear bezels,
and although the model we saw didn’t
include one, a SuperDisk (LS120) drive can
be integrated into the unit as well.

Again, this is only a reference design.
Final models and features will vary by
manufacturer.

—Bryan Del Rizzo

product info

Available Summer 1998
Price Under $1,000
Developer Cirrus Logic
(OEMs to be announced)
Phone 510.623.8300
URL www.cirrus.com

62 boot APR 98

War of the worlds

The 10th Planet

In a distant future, our solar system is a ravaged battlefield, and mighty
starship armadas are the tools of our destruction. Using a previously
unknown tenth planet orbiting our solar system as its staging ground,
an invading alien force plans on conquering Earth and destroying
anything that gets in its way.

Thus begins The 10th Planet, Bethesda’s epic space-combat saga that
promises to take space combat to the next level. Lead designer Bruce
Nesmith takes us deep into enemy territory to bring you this battle report.

Behind the cockpit of your fighter, you’ll have the run of the solar system in
The 10th Planet.

boot What does Bethesda bring to
space-combat that X-Wing or Wing
Commander haven’t already?

Nesmith The 10th Planet has three major
elements to it: ship-to-ship dogfighting, the
strategy game, and ship construction. The
last two set us apart from other games.

The strategy game is the foundation for
our ship combat missions. Every location in

Even with this many ships on-screen, Bethesda promises
you’ll get no slowdown in frame rate.

the solar system has an available mission.

If you always choose easy missions or
those that have little impact on the war,
you will eventually lose. To win, you must
choose your missions carefully.

With ship construction and customiza-
tion, you can put over 100 pieces of
equipment on your ship. Every game
function must be tied
to a piece of equip-
ment. For example,
you can turn your ship
left only if you have a
left thruster. When you
build your ship, you
make hard choices
between engine power,
maneuverability,
weapons, defenses,
and specialty equip-
ment. You cannot have
the best of everything.

In combat, the equip-
ment can be damaged.
boot Will The 10th
Planet deal with
individual fighter

craft combat , or
will we be able to
command a massive
capital ship?

Nesmith The game is oriented to the
fighter pilot in a one-man ship. However,
you fight bigger ships, such as destroyers
and huge motherships.

You can play with varying fleet sizes.

You can be the squadron leader of up
to six ships that fly in formation with
you. You can order them to peel off
and attack individual targets, or keep
them with you. At the most, you might
face two dozen alien ships.
boot You’ve said that your XnGINE
3D gaming engine would not use
3D hardware acceleration. Have
you changed your view?

Nesmith Our original statement is still
true. However, we have an outstanding
R&D department. They’ve written a new
engine that uses the 3Dfx hardware,
which we showed off at E3. The 10th
Planet will ship with two versions: one for
software only and one for use with 3Dfx
hardware accelerators.
boot How has the XnGINE been
optimized?

Nesmith Every game we release has an
improved version of the XnGINE. The big
challenge for us with The 10th Planet was
the scope of space. We will
be able to display objects
of any size, at any distance.

We can now support
any video resolution, includ-
ing mode X resolutions, so
players can get an optimal
frame rate for their machine.

We don’t need OpenGL
or Direct3D. They would just
slow us down.

boot How many polygons
will XnGINE push?

Nesmith There is really
no upper limit; it’s really
dependent on the machine
specs. We’ve found that
with higher-end computers,
it takes a back seat to other

issues. Even our smallest fighter has
several hundred polygons. If we doubled
that, it wouldn’t make a dramatic differ-
ence to the frame rate.
boot Will we see any cool effects
such as colored lighting , perspective
correct shadows, and the like?
Nesmith You’ll see all of those. The cock-
pit glass will transparently reflect the stars.
The engine glows will have colored lights.
All HUD elements will be translucent. Explo-
sions will be 3D alpha blends. In particular,
our sunlight effect has gotten rave reviews.
Enemies coming at you with the sun behind
them are almost impossible to see.
boot Will there be multiplayer mayhem?
Nesmith The strategy game itself would
not work in multiplayer mode, but there
will be both deathmatch and co-operative
missions. The coolest thing about multi-
player is how it uses ship customization.
Each player can customize his ship and
save it separately. Then, you can fly in
deathmatch or team vs. team play.
boot Any support for specialty con-
trollers such as force-feedback?
Nesmith We will support any l-force-com-
patible joystick. Since all the controls are
user configurable, players will be able to
set up just about any type of advanced
joystick or throttle combination.
boot What’s the Al like?

Nesmith Ships fly in squadrons, so there
are actually two levels of Al, one for indi-
vidual ships and another for the squadron.
The ships will be smart enough to do
subtle things like executing a roll to
present stronger shields to the player.

product info

Available Q2 1998
Price TBA

Developer Bethesda Softworks
Phone 800.677.0700
URL www.bethsoft.com

It’s not a Dralthi, but one of the many alien
fighters you’ll encounter.

Your fighter will be fully customizable— get
ready to spend lotsa time tweakin’ that ship.

APR 98 boot 63

CPU/MOTHERBOARD

bootMark

WIN95 APPS

SYS mark 3 2

DIRECT3D

ForsakenMark

composite

HARD DRIVE

Adaptec Thread Mark v2.0 MB/st 'J

CD-ROM

CD Tach/Pro vl.65

WIN95 VIDEO

ActiveMovie

DOS GAMING

Quake vl.06

DIRECTX GAMIIi

MDK PerfTest vl.4 A

DeBabelizer \

Miomsoft Visual O* compile

K Price Here
V Company Here
0 Phone Here
URL www.Here.com

ftrillct

company

1 GB maximum RAM w/
four free SIMM slots

VESA 2.0 incompatible
FM-synth sound
No free PCI slots

S-video and composite
video outputs

boot isn’t like any other computer magazine ,
and neither is our product evaluation
process. We don’t test equipment in the
cold ', sterile environment of a warehouse-
sized lab , and we don't write our reviews
based on the test scores that
labcoat- wearing technicians scribble
on clipboards.

Our review scores are based on
a combination of objective bench-
mark testing, real-world perform-
ance, and our subjective evaluation
of features, performance, and the
many less tangible characteristics
that go into a product. All our eval-
uations are based on hands-on use
of the product.

3J1 Benchmarks

Final Reality and X

We’ve added two new tests to our 3D
benchmarking bag of tricks. X is an
upcoming Direct3D space-combat and
trading game from EgoSoft. The demo
runs through a scripted series of scenes
and reports an average frame rate. Final
Reality, a comprehensive 2D/3D bench-
mark developed by VNU European Labs,
is based around a game engine from
Remedy Entertainment's upcoming Max
Payne. It tests several fly-through
scenes, as well as some abstract perfor-
mance tests. Look for both new tests on
the bootDisc.

REAL-WORLD BENCHMARKING
The new meter has the precise scores for each
category benchmarked. Plus, the color bars to the
right give you a quick idea of how well the system
performed in that category.

It’s simple: The farther right the bar reaches, the
better the system scored. Green means the system
performed on par or beyond what we expect of a
current system. If you see nothing but red, the system
performed below expectations.

PLUSES AND MINUSES
Here’s where we list the best
and worst a system has to offer.

CONTACTS

Look here for price and the company’s

phone number and URL if you want

more information. ■■■■■

Only the best earn enough
respect to be worthy of our

editors’-choice award.

BOOT VERDICT

The one that really matters. This score reflects how we feel
about a system, taking into account the benchmark results,
quality of parts, usability, overall performance, and our
intense, under-the-hood scrutiny.

bootLab Policy

product name

Real3D Starfighter AGP

OpenGL

Ouake-o-rama

GLQuake (512x384)

47.1 fps

(640x480)

37.6fps

GLQuake II (512x384)

27.0fps

(640x480)

24.9fps

(800x600)

20.1 fps

(1024x768)

12.8fps

• GL mini driver version beta 1.2.4.01 19.

• DEM files used:

GLQuake=bootmark.dem; GLQuake
H=demo2.dm2

The new kid’s in town

Real3D’s StarFighter AGP card —
the love child of Intel, Lockheed-
Martin’s Real3D, and Chips and
I Technology— rocks.

Intel’s 2D/3D i740 (previewed
in boot 19) powers this Star-
Fighter. With the 3D processor
running at 66MHz, the i740’s 64-
bit split-memory architecture design is
coupled with 8MB of lOOMFlz SGRAM and a
220MHz RAMDAC. And, as a full AGP-2x-
with-sidebands-compliant part, all those
juicy 15MB+ textures are ready to jump

from system
memory
directly into
the i740 for
texel process-
ing. The
board is
cleanly laid
out, with a
white mini-
connector
sitting next to
the heatsink-
laden i740
for an

optional DVD
daughtercard.
Sadly, the
version
reviewed
doesn’t come
with TV
inputs or
outputs.

How does it perform? Pretty damned hot.
DOS performance is fast. With a little help
from VESA 2.0 support built into the flash-
able video BIOS, the StarFighter posted a
cool 30fps in 640x480 Quake. Considering
Chips and Technology’s major tech knowl-
edge comes from the laptop world, the
i740’s DirectDraw performance is also top
notch, meeting Riva 128 or V2200 per-
formance in our MDK PerfTest and Final
Reality DirectDraw tests.

But pump some texture-mapped
polygons its way, and the Starfighter
works them like there’s no tomorrow.
Before all you Voodoo 2 heads get bent
out of shape, let’s get one thing clear: the
StarFighter will not do lOOfps in Quake II.
What it does give you is superb visuals,
and it backs up all that prettiness with
ample performance. Attention to visual
quality was one of Intel’s prime goals
with i740, and it’s succeeded— and then

The AGP

Final Reality

20.3MB

11 8.91 fps

16MB

123.76fps

12.3MB

136.84fps

The

Direct3D

Gauntlet

Direct3D Performance

ForsakenMark (512x684)
57.46fps

f

ForsakenMark (640x480)

64.95fps

ForsakenMark (800x600)

41.98fps

ForsakenMark (1 024x768)

30.1 9fps

X (640x480)

66.68fps

X (800x600)

60.26fps

X (1024x768)

45.08fps

Turok (512x384)

74.4fps

Turok (640x480)

68.4fps

Turok (800x600)

34.2fps

Final Reality 25Pixel

22.31 Kpolys/s

Final Reality Fill Rate

207.49Mpixels/s

some. With its combination of per-pixel
mip-mapping and support for almost
every 3D feature set, including trilinear
filtering and edge anti-aliasing, the
StarFighter clocked in a steady 60fps+ at
640x480 in all our Direct3D tests. From
Turok to ForsakenMark, those pixels flew.
The StarFighter does take a performance
hit when bumping up the resolution,
although 40-odd fps isn’t anything to
scoff at. Under Jedi Knight, transparencies
showed up clear as crystal, while frame
rates wandered from 60fps at 640x480.

We can’t stress enough just how gorgeous
D3D titles appear with the StarFighter —
blended, colored lighting and excellent
alpha-blending abound in Forsaken,
exhibiting zero errors. Hell, the StarFighter
posted crazy-sexy-cool frame rates under
the Final Reality AGP tests— even with
20MB of texture.

At the time of testing, the StarFighter’s
Win95 ICDs were not ready for prime
time. So, Real3D had us use its very own
D3D-to-GL wrapper for our Quake testing.
Performance should suck with this hack

Feature Set and
2JL Performance

Max 24-bit resolution/refresh 1 280x1 024/85Hz

Max 1 6-bit resolution/refresh 1 280x1 024/85Hz

DOS Quake (640x480) 31 .3fps

DOS Quake (800x600) 22.4fps

MDK PerfTest vl .4 (DirectDraw) 1 27

Final Reality Radial Blur (DirectDraw) 29.84fps
Final Reality Chaos Zoomer (DirectDraw) 40.82fps

Test system: Micron Millennia XRU; CPU: Intel Pentium II
300MHz; 0/S: Windows 95 0SR2. 1 Build 1212b; Motherboard:

Intel AN440 440LXAGPset (1 AGP, 2 PCI, 2 ISA, 1 PCI/ISA shared)

Here it is, in all its
8MB goodness. Real3D’s
StarFighter is one kick-ass
video card capable of pumping AGP
textures across at 2x speeds with side-
bands. The Rage Pro ain't the only 2x AGP
part in town no more.

in place, right? Wrong. Even with this
OPEN32.DLL file in place, the StarFighter
easily outgunned Hercules’ 8MB Thriller
3D by posting a cool 37fps in 640x480
GLQuake— faster
than the high
teens/low twenties
Voodoo Rush
boards give. A full-
featured ICD for
Win95 and MCD
for NT4 should be
ready by the time
you read this,
something ATI has
yet to accomplish with its Rage Pro.

MPEG-1 playback is best served at
640x480/16-bit. You can crank as high as
1024x768, but anything higher results in
chop-o-rama frame rates and blocky edges.

ATI’s no longer the only AGP 2x pony in
town, and Real3D’s level of visual excel-
lence and performance— honed in the
arcades— shines through in the StarFighter.
Look out world, i740’s here.

—Andrew Sanchez

THE STATS: BIOS: 203-AGP vl .0 I Win95 Drivers:
3.2.0132(584) THE BUNDLE: Win95 Drivers I
Real3D demos: WIRL I VRCreator I Kinesub I
Incoming I Planet Tours I Town I
Realimation SDK I Netlmmerse I Bat
Cave I Digital Bayou I Space City I
3Deep I Game Bundle TBD

Price $249 (8MB AGP)
Company Real3D
Phone 800.393.7730
URL www.real3d.com

APR 98 boot 65

ISA Modem

Polywell K6 266Mx

Banishing Intel to processor purgatory

AMD

rs preaching the holy gospel of
Socket 7, and its 1998
roadmap is proof of its
zealous commitment to
the Zero Insertion
Force religion. Enter
Polywell Computers, a worthy acolyte and
follower of the build-to-order cult, with its
latest K6-armed system.

The slate blue, medium ATX tower
houses Polywell’s own Poly 500TX6 moth-
erboard. This system’s only allegiance to
Intel is in the core-logic chipset used —
the 430TX PCIset. Otherwise, it’s AMD-
inside this bad-boy, but not just any K6.
This system’s blessed with AMD’s 266MHz
K6, their fastest to date. Hidden under-
neath a fan/heatsink combo, the CPU and
the four SIMM and two DIMM sockets suf-
fer from Freaky Friday syndrome, with the
CPU located to the right of the 250-watt
ATX power supply fan — ugh!

Pixel-pushing duties are relegated to
the dynamic duo of Diamond’s Voodoo-
powered Monster 3D and a 4MB ViRGE/
DX board wired to an ebony Sampo
Alphascan 17-inch SVGA monitor. For
tunes and tones, Polywell opts for a
menage-a-deux as well, with a Crystal
CS37W 16-bit ISA soundcard for DOS
legacy support and Diamond’s Monster
Sound for much 3D sonic seduction.
Adding to this mayhem is a gaggle of
Yamaha speakers for full surround-
sound effect: the System 45s take care
of front satellites and subwoofer
duties, while the YST-M15s
work the rear. A Diamond Supra
K56flex internal fax/vo ice/modem
is on hand for high-speed surf-
ing. Meanwhile, Maxtor’s 85250D
5.1GB Ultra DMA IDE hard drive
and Toshiba’s 6102B 24x EIDE
CD-ROM drive are in effect. And,
if you wanna add more stuff, the
one 3.5-inch and two 5.25-inch
drive bays should keep you
happy, as everything is easy
to get to.

On the performance tip, this
machine posts the fastest scores
ever seen for a Socket 7 processor
by posting a 99.8 on our bootMark. The
closest score Intel ever mustered was in
the mid 60s with its 233MHz Pentium
part. The K6 may kick ass against any
Socket 7 CPU, but it comes up short
in comparison to a 266MHz Pentium II
processor, which posts around mid-to-

high 120s, depending on memory configu-
ration. Regardless, the Polywell system
posted excellent Visual C++ compile
times, easily running neck-and-neck with
many of the P-ll 266MHz machines we’ve
seen, as is the DeBabilizer Pro/N\N\X
processing. Direct3D gaming is also
sweet, with the K6/Voodoo combo cough-
ing up 51fps under ForsakenMark. Hard
drive and CD-ROM performance are mid-
dling, but acceptable. The MDK PerfTest
score of 90 is low, but Quake tells the
big floating-point story. As expected, the
ViRGE/DX chip refused to do SVGA until
we sicced Display Doctor on its ass, and
even then, it hobbled along at 14.9fps —
more the fault of the video card than the
CPU, we reckon.

Purge the ViRGE and go with another
2D solution (nVidia, Matrox, ATI, and
Number Nine come to mind), and swap
out the Sampo Alphascan 17-incher for
something with higher refresh rates to
achieve visual nirvana. While the Crystal
soundcard gives you legacy support,
why a genuine Creative Labs part wasn’t
employed is odd.

Overall, the Polywell K6 266 Mx is a
great starting point. If you excise those
funky parts, you’ll be well on your way to
AMD nirvana.

Hard Drive

Maxtor 85250D 5.1 6B Ultra DMA IDE

FREAKY FRIDAY

Gadzooks! Whoever
designed this mother-
board should be
burned at the stake!
What were they think-
ing placing the CPU
away from the ATX
power-supply fan?

—Andrew Sanchez

THE BRAINS

CPU

AMD K6 266MHz

L2 Cache

51 2K pipeline-burst external
(nonupqradable)

BAM

64MB SDRAM (256MB max)

MOTHERBOARD:

Poly 500TX6 ATX (430TX)

THE BRAWN

Video

S3 ViRGE/DX with 4MB, Diamond

Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo) ['

CD-ROM

Toshiba 6102B 24x EIDE

Expansion

Three PCI, three ISA, one shared ISA/PCI

Fax/modem

Diamond Supra K56flex fax/voice/modem (K56flex
compatible)

I/O Ports

THE BEAUTY
Display

Two USB, two serial, one parallel, two game/MIDI
(one active)

Sampo Alphascan 17-inch monitor, 0.28mm dot-

Sound

Crystal CS37W-3DIS/C 16-bit ISA card, Diamond
Monster Sound PCI

Speakers

Yamaha System 45 (two YST-M15 satellites and
YST-MSW10 subwoofer)

Other

Genius NetMouse

THE BUNDLE Windows 95 0SR2 I Necessary device
drivers for hardware

EX.PAN.S-l.QLLM A £

PCI Video Card

PCI

Video Card

PC!

Free

PCI/ISA Sound card (PCI occupied)

ISA Soundcard

66 boot APR 98

KEEPING THE SOCKETS
CHILLED-FOR WHAT?

Oh well, at least your RAM keeps
cool— DIMM or SIMM, It’s your choice.

CPU/MOTHERBOARD

bootMark .

mm

WIN95 APPS

SYSmark32

DIRECT3D

ForsakenMark

composite

HARD DRIVE

Adaptec Thread Mark v2.0

MB/sec

CD-ROM

CD Tach/Pro vl.65

WIN95 VIDEO

Active Movie

SPEED III

This # Poly 500TX6 mainboard H
comes ready for much over- *
clocking pleasure. With DIP-
switch settings going up to 5.5x
(for a m axirrqim burn-out speed
of 363MHT), you'fcan work that
430TX till it’s black globby junk.
The board also handles Intel and
Cyrix CPUs.

We know all you bootHeads
out there wbuld never forgive us
if we didn’t try spooking this K6
266 into performing feats of
300MHz madness. With the DIP
switches set to 4.5x, we tried
making the big jump. Alas, while
the system POSTed properly,
entering Win95 caused massive
cascading crashes. Even after
adjusting the BIOS, we couldn’t
get to 300MHz. Bummer.

DOS GAMING

Quake vl.06

DIRECTX GAMING

MDK PerfTest vl.4

MMX PROCESSING

DeBabelizer Pro r

CPU/DISK

Microsoft Visual C” compile

DOUBLE

VISION

We dig the Monster
3D. Combined with the
K6 266, it performs
D3D admirably. But
that stank-ho ViRGE/DX
has gotta go.

I

Price $2,721
Company Polywell

Computers

Phone 800.999.1278
URL www.polywell.com

forilct

SONIC SURROUND-
SOUND MADNESS

With ISA and PCI sound-
cards in tow, you can
experience front and rear
surround-sound action
thanks to the Monster
Sound’s outputs. We hope
you have the space for all
these darned speakers.

AMD’s most-powerful CPU i
powers Polywell’s K6
266Mx, and with 266MHz
sitting in the socket, expect
much goodness fromjt.

AMD K6 266MHz CPU

Diamond Monster 3D with
3Dfx Voodoo

Yamaha speakers a-plenty

Dual soundcards for
complete legacy support
and 3D sound

Fastest performance of a
Socket 7 CPU to date

Great Direct3D performance

\ complete breakdown of benchmark results is available
>n the bootNet. Point your browser to

Less-than-stellar monitor
S3 ViRGE has no VESA 2.0
support

CPU and RAM sockets
backward on motherboard
Flighty mouse
Crystal ISA card should
have been a genuine
Creative Labs part

It’s a PCI Soundcard Party

Living melodically on your 32-bit bus

Nothing brings the burliest CPU down like mixing multiple digital samples in
realtime. Being bound to an ISA device that sits on a slow-as-a-slug bus and
forcing your processor to sweat out the mixing details only make things worse.

With the advent of PCI soundcards and DirectSound, these bottlenecks are
rendered mute. Used with a core-logic chipset that handles distributed DMA and
bus-mastering PCI, many of these new cards claim almost 100% legacy SoundBlaster
support over the PCI bus— something Creative Labs said couldn't happen. Also, by getting rid of
expensive local ROM and putting all your MIDI samples in system memory, these new PCI cards are
cheap. But make sure the chips are true 3D sound accelerators and aren't merely ''compliant."

—Andrew Sanchez

Ensoniq AudioPCI S501 6

Powered by Ensoniq’s ES1370 Digital
Audio and Music Controller, the AudioPCI
S5016 uses either 2MB or 4MB wavetable
soundsets (switchable via a Control Panel
applet) and conforms to GMIDI standards.
The synthesizer pumps up to 32 simultane-
ous voices, and all sorts of digital effects
can be administered on those samples.
Distributed DMA is not required with this
board. The ES1370 is DirectX compliant,
but not Aureal3D compliant, and because
it has no integrated DSP, the majority of
sound mixing and acceleration is still done
by the CPU via the faster PCI bus.

The board’s I/O panel houses a joystick
port, as well as three 1/8-inch mini cables
for stereo-out, mike-in, and line-in. Mean-
while, the three internal connectors are
strictly for the CD-ROM drive.

The AudioPCI installed without a hitch,
with three drivers taking residence under
Win95. Legacy real-mod DOS SBPro and
GMIDI support is handled by a TSR. DOS,
Win3.1, and WinNT 4 are also supported.

Under our battery of tests, the AudioPCI
S5016 kept up with the pack, sporting low
CPU utilization under DirectSound and
passing our DOS legacy support tests. All
the digital joysticks worked fine. The
sound quality of the AudioPCI S5016 is
sharp and precise, with no distortion. The
default 2MB of MIDI patches are surpris-
ingly lush, with excellent strings and per-
cussions, although the horns sound
artificial. The biggest fault? The S5016
doesn’t have a true DSP onboard. So while
you’ll enjoy the faster bus and memory
access of PCI, don’t expect any help from
the ES1370 when a boatload of 44KHz

It may not have all those cool
sound APIs covered, but the AudioPCI’s
MIDI tones are sweet.

samples hits this sound system.

Still, as a SoundBlaster replacement,
the AudioPCI is no joke, but it lives in a
world where audio acceleration will play a
bigger and bigger role; and there, it comes
up short.

THE STATS: Signal/Noise Ratio: 90db
I Frequency Response: 20Hz-22KHz
THE BUNDLE: Win95/NT4 Drivers

Price $79
Company Ensoniq
Phone 800.610.4847
URL www.ensoniq.com

Diamond Monster
Sound M80

Its sire was in boofs Dream Machine 97,
and this year Diamond’s expanding on its
Monster Sound line of PCI soundcards
with the Monster Sound M80.

This card prefers an ISA board sitting
alongside for 100% legacy compliance,
with Analog Devices’ 2181 (a 40MIPS DSP)
forming the core. This ASIC is the only
board tested here to accelerate all
three 3D sound APIs in
hardware, so games
with the

While the
Monster Sound
3D M80 lacks full
DLS compliance, you can
chuck that little ROM board
and slap in 4MB from Roland or
Yamaha. This thing supports all
sound-acceleration flavors.

Aureal3D-compatible logo will fire positional
sounds without taking a performance hit.
Next to the CD-ROM input connectors sits
an SB16-compliant header connector for
waveblaster-style daughtercards (currently
occupied by a 32-voice AdMos MIDI ROM).
I/O duties are relegated to 1/8-inch stereo-in
and out, mike-in, and a 15-pin joystick port.

Diamond provides a massive Monster
Cable 1/8-inch mini cable for hook-up with
your existing ISA solution.

The M80 performed as expected, sporting
low CPU utilization and keeping up frame
rates. Digital samples came through loud
and clear, while the AdMos chimed in some
decent MIDI tunage. While the system is
not DLS compliant, the WaveBlaster header
connector lets you swap out that board with
something sexier. But don’t expect any real-
mode DOS support, as the M80 failed
both tests.

With the shipping joystick drivers,
the M80 can identify only the
Microsoft Force Feedback stick and
not the two Thrustmasters. Diamond
recommends you get the latest

joystick driver from Microsoft. Also, DLS

fanatics are left hanging.

Make no mistake— the
Monster Sound M80 is not meant .
as a SoundBlaster replacement. ^
Rather, it’s designed to give folks
with DirectSound3D or Aureal3D-
compatible games a chance to
immerse their aural desires without
sacrificing SB legacy support.

ft

IK

THE STATS: Signal/Noise Ratio: 90db I
Frequency Response: 20Hz-20KHz
THE BUNDLE:Wm% Drivers I Jedi Knight:
Pathway to the Force I Wave Editor I
Midisoft Studio Recording Session I
Microsoft NetShow I Internet Explorer
Intervista WorldView 2.0 1 Midisoft
Internet Sound Bar

Price $100

Company Diamond

Multimedia

Phone 800.468.5846

URL www.diamondmm.com

Turtle Beach Daytona PCI

The only board of the bunch with full DLS
support, Turtle Beach’s Daytona PCI sports
S3’s SonicVibes under the hood, so you
know it sounds sweet. Via the DLS (only
available in Win95), the Daytona PCI locks
in up to 10MB of system memory for high-
quality, 32-voice MIDI, while the 16-bit
delta sigma ADC/DAC promises crisp digital
sample playback. This board requires a
chipset that supports distributed DMA.

While the Daytona PCI can handle
DirectSound fine, it’s not a DirectSound3D
or Aureal3D accelerator, although it does
come with SRS surround-sound enhance-
ments. While internal header connectors
are relegated to CD-ROM inputs, I/O ports
consist of a 15-pin joystick/MIDI interface
and four 1/8-inch mini connectors. Apart
from the SonicVibes chip and one PROM
chip, the board is barren.

Installation was a snap, with the DLS
manager setting up house inside the
Control Panel. Resources for legacy
support are as expected (one DMA,

IRQ, and some I/O address). While the
SonicVibes supports full real-mode DOS
support via TSR, Turtle Beach opts for
DOS-in-a-window support only. Turtle
Beach recommends you sit the Daytona
PCI alongside your current ISA solution
if you want 100% compatibility.

The Daytona PCI gives some silky-
smooth MIDI playback. The stock patches
are a mixed bag, with strong percussion
and strings, but artificial horns. And with
frame rates and CPU utilization
keeping stride, what
stops the Daytona PCI
from kicking ass and
taking names? Digital
game controllers.
Thrustmaster’s Millennium
Inceptor 3D is

Download those
new DLS patches and
tweak your MIDI to per-
fection with the Daytona
PCI soundcard— but you’ll
need to grab that dongle to
play with digital joysticks.

the only stick
it recognizes.
Without that
TSR, legacy DOS
support was a
dismal failure.

THE STATS: Signal/Noise Ratio: N/A I Total
Frequency Response: N/A THE BUNDLE:
Win95/NT4 Drivers I Voyetra MIDI I Jam
Grid Orchestrator Plus I AudioStation I DLS
Manager I AudioView I MIDI Orchestrator

I Music Games I Audio Calender I
Say It!

Price $130

Company Turtle Beach
Systems

Phone 800.233.9377
URL www.tbeach.com

p_a_L£ to CjunjLajie.

Test

AudioPCI

SonicStorm

Monster Sound M80

Daytona PCI

Digital Joystick Compliance

Microsoft Force Feedback joystick

YES

YES

YES

NO*

Thrustmaster Millennium Inceptor 3D

YES

YES

NO

YES

Thrustmaster Rage3D

YES

YES

NO

NO*

% CPU Utilization via DirectSound

Eight mixed signals ** 3.94 - 4.1 2%

3.96 - 4.03%

3.94 - 4.04%

3.96-4.01%

Legacy Real-Mode DOS Support (PASS/FAIL)

Dark Forces/iMuse sound engine

PASS

PASS

FAIL

FAIL

TerraNova/AIL by Miles Audio Designs

PASS

PASS

FAIL

FAIL

Win95 DirectSound Performance (fps)

ForsakenMark (640x480)

44.17

44.2

44.7

44.2

GLQuake (640x480)

25.4

26.9

25.5

25.5

GLQuake2 (640x480)

18.8

18.5

18.7

18.8

Win95 Sound Feature Set

DirectSound accelerator

NO

YES

YES

YES

DirectSound 3D accelerator

NO

YES

YES

NO

Aureal A3D compliant

NO

NO ***

YES

NO

Downloadable Sample Compliant

NO ****

NO ***

NO *****

YES

Adjustable sample RAM

YES

NO ***

jyjQ *****

YES

THE STATS: Signal/Noise Ratio: 85db I
Total Harmonic Distortion: 20Hz-20KHz
THE BUNDLE: Drivers for Win95 I a
Audio Rack I Midisoft Studio 4.0 a
Lite I Mixman 3-Mix I * i

VideoLogic SonicStorm

With a grand line of video cards under
its belt, VideoLogic breaks into untried
territory with its SonicStorm soundcard.

Powered by ESS’s Maestro-1 (a 500MIPS
DSP), the SonicStorm supports Qsound,
DirectSound, and DirectSound3D accelera-
tion, but not Aureal3D with the current
driver. Also, these drivers lock in 2MB of
system memory for wavetable samples.

The ability to adjust memory usage (from
2MB to 4MB), full Microsoft DLS support,
and Aureal3D emulation are promised via
new drivers. I/O duties are handled by 1/8-
inch stereo-in, line-out, mike-in, and 15-pin
joystick/MIDI ports, but there is no internal
header connector for WaveBlaster-compati-
ble MIDI boards. Still, the SonicStorm
supports 64 channels of wavetable.

Installation was uneventful, with
VideoLogic’s HTML-based front-end provid-
ing online instructions, demos, and a host
of installation options, including legacy
support. If you must have DOS support,
you’ll be eating up drivers and resources,
so choose with care.

On the sound-quality tip, digital effects
came through sharp and crisp: Forsaken's
laser blasts and Quake IPs explosions
rocked the house. Unfortunately, the 2MB
of MIDI samples reeked of artificiality, so
don’t expect the sweeping strings and
bombastic percussion of a Roland-caliber
wave-synth. Meanwhile, legacy support is

^ fk

DLS

support

would make the
SonicStorm one
helluva sound card.

Alas, you’re forced to wait >

until new drivers appear. Drat!

strong, with both real-mode
DOS tests working without a hitch.

Unlike the GMIDI-ready Ensoniq board,
you only get crappy FM-synth for real-
mode DOS games (DOS in a window gets
you MIDI). But the SonicStorm survived our
digital joystick gauntlet.

The killer low price and strong legacy
support make the SonicStorm a contender,
but VideoLogic had better get those new
drivers going so we can chuck these
wimpy default MIDI patches.

Price $99

Company VideoLogic
Phone 800.578.5644
URL www.videologic.com

* Microsoft makes a $12 dongle for its digital joysticks that allows use with Turtle Beach and a number of other cards.

** Under Qsound QMixer 95 v2.24, eight . WAV files of varying sampling rates and channels were played simultaneously through the
DirectSound driver.

*** Forthcoming drivers promise to implement features.

**** While not DSL compliant, you can download bigger MIDI sample sets.

***** No DLS or adjustable RAM, but does have WaveBlaster-compatible header connector.

Test system: CPU: Intel Pentium II 233MHz, Motherboard: ASUStek P2L97 440LX, RAM: 64MB SDRAM, Video Card:

Rendition V2200 AGP reference board with 4MB SGRAM, 0/S: Windows 95 0SR2. 1 Build 1212b with DirectX 5 >

APR 98 boot 69

LCDs that’ll leave you grooving for some tubing

Cool, Thin, Flat

Flat-panel LCD displays still haven't fully realized their potential. In their defense:

They weigh next to nothing and require a miniscule desktop footprint. They consume
very little power and emit very little heat. They don't redraw (because their LCD cells
are either on or off) and therefore don't suffer flicker when running at low refresh
rates. And lacking color guns, they cannot experience misconvergence problems.

But flat-panels aren't perfect: They only run well at a single resolution. They're
prone to bad off-axis viewing, which means you can't discern screen detail from wide
angles. They tend to dither colors that appear solid on traditional monitors. They're
disposed to ghosting problems, and even the best screens ship with broken pixels.

And they're still extremely expensive.

Nonetheless, flat-panels are ultracool, high-tech dynamos that make you feel like you're a
Star Trek science officer. Optimized for 1024x768/16-bit color, each of this month's Plug-n-
Play contenders prove that flat-panel technology is getting better. Unfortunately, none of the
three come close to comparing with the kick-ass Compaq TFT500 reviewed in boot 14.

—Jon Phillips

The PanoView 745 desperately needs contrast
controls. And what’s up with the plasma effect?

ViewSonic VP1 40

The 14-inch viewable VP140 is the best flat-
panel in this roundup. It boasts superior
off-axis viewing and
image clarity, and
high-res bitmap per-
formance came
closest to CRT
quality at the same
resolution and
color-bit depth. The
| display includes
| contrast and bright-
, _ 1 ness controls

directly on the
SBBW— " w front panel, but
you won’t need them if you go
with the defaults. The
VP 140 rocked at
800x600, with very
little text degradation and
no artifacts in bitmap
images (the other displays
had obvious bitmap jaggies at this resolu-
tion). Text definition at 1024x768 was equal
to the PanoView. Color purity and intensity
bettered the other two units. And guess
what? No stuck pixels!

Unfortunately, the display had very bad
streaking problems— but this was the only
obvious ding. Still, we’ve seen much better
LCD image quality and off-axis viewing
before, so while the 12-lb,

14xl4x6-inch VP140 takes top
honors this month, it falls
well short of kick-ass.

The VP140 is the
best of the bunch,
ghosting aside.

Price $1,460
Company ViewSonic
Phone 800.888.8583
URL www.viewsonic.com

Philips Brilliance 4500AX

The 4500AX features brightness and
contrast wheels directly on its front panel-
praise the lord! Color uniformity and inten-
sity is on par with the PanoView, but image
quality is superior. High-res, continuous-
tone bitmaps simply look better on this
much cheaper, 14.5-inch viewable display.
When running 800x600, you must manually
expand your display to fit edge-to-edge,
but text legibility at this bastard resolution
is better than average. Off-axis viewing is
also good.

Flaws

included stuck
pixels, ghosting
extending from
solid blocks of
color, and
dubious font
definition at 9
pixels (6.8
point). The 11.4-
lb, 14.3x14.5x6-
inch Philips
includes front-
mounted

speakers, along with
a volume control
and headphone jack.

While the 4500AX is
a contender in this
roundup, it hardly
represents the apex of
flat-panel technology.

Three stuck pixels?
Ouch! At least you
get contrast control.

Price $1,900
Company Philips
Phone 800.835.3506
URL www. philips
monitors.com

CTX PanoView 745

The 745 is an otherwise typical display
that’s marred by a glaring omission: no
contrast control. This oversight wouldn’t
be so bad if the screen shipped with
perfect contrast, but it doesn’t. Contrast
was so bad, we couldn’t see any defini-
tion in menu tabs. Other dings include
glacial control adjustment speed and a
strange display quality that makes the
screen look like it has a thin film of
plasma underneath its glass pane. The
unit we reviewed also had an
annoying loose pedestal hinge.

In the PanoView’s favor,
it displayed great color
uniformity and intensity
throughout all portions of
the screen, and suffered only
one stuck pixel. Ghosting was
just shy of intangible, and
off-axis viewing was fine.

Arial text was legible at 9
pixels (6.8 point), but
| 3 . degraded into mush at 8

pixels (6 point). When

running at 800x600, the screen
itfwinw*’ 1 auto-expands to the full 14.5-
inches viewable. Text definition
was bad at this resolution.

The 15.5xl5x7-inch display weighs 12
lbs and includes a swivel base and front-
mounted speakers. The ridiculous
contrast problem and high
price knock the 745 down
two verdict points.

Price $2,400
Company CTX Opto
Phone 408.541.6060
URL www.ctxoptp.com

70 boot APR 98

Bryce 3D

The motion of the ocean

Adding “3D” to the Bryce name seems an
odd move, given that the terrain rendering
app has always been in 3D and that the
addition in the latest rev is really anima-
tion. Still, we suppose they couldn’t pass
up the opportunity (especially with a
product as enigmatically named as Bryce.)

Not that animation is the only addition
to the program.

The most welcomed new improvement
is the addition of the infinite slab (to go
along with the infinite plane). The slab
takes the plane concept and adds depth,
which makes it perfect for bodies of water
and a necessity if you’re animating an
object passing through the wet stuff.

A stiff competitor for most coveted
addition has to be what MetaCreations
refers to as Hyper Textures, although you
and I know it as volumetric lighting. This

Impress your friends! If the animation you create with Bryce
3D doesn’t, this interface will.

effect opens up an entire new world.

Instead of textures merely being pasted
to the surface of a polygon object, with
this new feature they permeate an object.
This may not matter when you’re dealing
with a stone pillar, but it makes all the
difference in the 3D world when you’re
dealing with a shaft of light. And the
effects you can achieve with volumetric
water texture when creating animations
with a moving camera that plunges below
the surface are mind blowing.

But everything in Bryce 3D comes down
to one thing: ani-
mation. With this
version, Bryce
breaks free of its
novelty niche and
joins the ranks of
real 3D apps by
adding sophisti-
cated animation
tools that allow
you to output
your movies in

Create

Sky&fog

. iu. i i

0

:¥ #

A *11

Depending on what you’re doing, Bryce 3D displays a
different overcooked menu, rife with cryptic graphics.
These things need a Rosetta Stone!

resolutions ranging
from thumbnail to
pro-grade via
QuickTime or as an
AVI. No longer are
you confined to
static frames, now
you can cruise
them in first-person
view and make
oceans overflow
and mountains
tumble with a few
clicks and drags of the mouse.

Bryce 3D’s keyframe animation tools are
timeline-based. You set up the scene, drag
the indicator forward along the bar, and
move your on-screen objects, much like a
claymation film works. The benefit is all the
tweening (creation of frames in between the
keyframes) is done by
the computer. If
simple point-A-to-
point-B motion isn’t
enough for you, jump
into Bryce 3D's
Advanced Motion Lab.

There you can edit
any object using a
suite of sophisticated
tools that allow you
to shape the motion
path (graphically dis-
played as a ribbon)
and control its velocity via
a time-mapping curve.

While handy, this all gets
a mite heady, so prepare
to calculate these vari-
ables in a quiet area.

In addition to all this,
the program has a scad of
new environment controls
that allow you to take
your mind’s eye to planets with multiple
suns and moons, and have day turn to
night (or vice versa) during an animation.

Unfortunately, a few
things are missing.

Like its predecessor,
Bryce 3D cannot export
models in DXF format
(the exception is the
preset models that
come with the
program). So Bryce is a
dead end if you’re
looking to integrate
with a more powerful

Once you’ve crafted your fantasy in wire frame (left) rendering the scene with Bryce
3D ’s raytracing engine makes it a reality.

Tenderer, although the program does
import DXF files (albeit with some limita-
tions) along with 3D metafile formats.

One standard feature missing from
Bryce 3D is the ability to assign behaviors
to objects. For example, properties such as
elasticity and gravity parameters would

make child’s play of creating
a bouncing rubber ball
scene, if such features were
present. As it is, the program
does not even support basic
collision detection, so you’re
condemned to a world of
phantom objects.

And given the price of the
program and all it can do, it
seems gratuitous to ask for
a particle generator (or at
least a plug-in architecture
for a third-party solution),
but we will anyway, ’cause
it’d be so rad.

Despite this, what this
gem provides makes it worth
many times the asking price.
Once you get beneath the
overcooked interface and get
your hands dirty, this is the
sort of program that’ll have
you wondering where the
time went when you look up at the rising
sun. But given the enormity of creating the
stacks of ray-traced screens required for
even a brief clip (and parallel procesing is
not an option), nights are best spent ren-
dering your movies while you
sleep and dream of tomorrow’s
fantasy landscape.

—Brad Dosland

Untitled

1:39:20

Pixels Rendered: 786432

262626

Primary Rayr 1.75 bit

22.24

Shadow Reyn: 2.07 bil

26.28

3.82 bil

48^52

2.58 bil

32.87

3.54 bil

121.26

Total Intersect AUnr.oir , . 1 .21 tri

154.13

Even for the relatively simple scene
shown here, Bryce 3D required well
over an hour to render the scene at
1024x768. And that’s just one frame! If
you want to make a movie at this res,
check into a monastery and get to it.

Price $199 (upgrade $99)
Company MetaCreations
Phone 800.566.6200
URL www.metacreations.com

APR 98 boot 71

1

Gateway 2000 G6-333XL

The Tower of Power

W Gateway’s newest off-
spring, the G6-333XL,
comes racked (in a
breathtakingly tall,
full-sized tower
case), stacked (with
incredible top-of-the-
line components),
and packed (with gusto per-
formance). What more could
= you ask for?

Not much. It has Intel’s
\ latest progeny, a 333MHz
i Deschutes Pentium II. It’s
crammed with RAM— 128MB
worth. It’s equipped with Adaptec’s
always-reliable 2940 Ultra Wide SCSI
Controller Card and a robust 9.0GB
Seagate Cheetah hard drive. It’s also
replete with Ensoniq’s PCI soundcard and
STB’s Riva-equipped Velocity 128. And if
that weren’t enough, there’s also a TV-
tuner card with three separate inputs. So
is anything missing?

A Zip drive? Included.

19-inch monitor? Ditto.

Second-generation DVD-ROM with hard-
ware MPEG decoding? You betcha!

TV-out. Wait a minute!

Uh oh. Can you believe it? For a system
heading for a coveted 10 rating, the G6-
333XL doesn’t include a TV-out port. And
all the expansion slots are full. But that
aside, once you’ve looked inside the cav-
ernous case, we reckon you’d feel the same
way we do about this machine— it’s almost
an ungraders dream come true. And
despite the lack of free slots, you do
have extra drive bays to fill. There’s
a vacant hard drive space too.

Performance is almost off the
charts. From gaming to processing
to overall system speed, the G6-
333XL rocks, and in the process
has set a number of new
bootRecords.

And while other companies
sacrifice components and function-
ality to shave a few cents off their
bottom line, Gateway continues to
assemble machines made from the
world’s finest PC components. Nary
a sacrifice has been made with any
of the G6-333XL’s individual compo-
nents. Every subsystem is solid muscle.
Take video. The Velocity 128 is good
enough to appease most 2D and 3D afi-
cionados, but there’s also a nifty TV-tuner
card (complete with multiple S-Video,

The Riva River
ElajuLelh

For all you Riva owners who felt it necessary to bom-
bard us with letters about driver updates, relax.
Gateway has seen the light and included updated dri-
vers that fix the infamous NV3 transparency problems.

coaxial cable, and NTSC video inputs).

Even better, there’s also a cool software
applet that allows you to manage the
video sources and capture either streams
of video or still images at the touch of a
button. The audio subsystem can be feted
as well: the combined speakers and PCI
soundcard will rock your house. And lest
we forget the inclusion of the Ultra Wide
SCSI card and an internal Zip drive, let us
proclaim: Storage has never been sweeter.
In fact about the only negative comment
we can muster is the hard drive— it makes
quite the racket when spinning.

From the standalone components (such
as the DVD-ROM’s and hard drive’s stellar
transfer rates) to the complete unit, the
G6-333XL is one hell of a machine. Heck,
it’s almost as if the engineers in the
Silicon Prairie purposely designed and
built this system with performance satisfac-
tion in mind.

All we can say is, it’s about time.

—Bryan Del Rizzo

Ete £<# Options Capture Help

WHAT HAPPENED TO
HUGH DOWNS?

What’s this? Barbara Walters doing a
show about sex? Yep, but only on her
morning show “The View.” Good thing
the G6-333XL includes a spiffy video-
capture utility, or you never would’ve
known.

I WANT MY PCTV

A virtual remote is also included.

You can jump between video sources
and access the capture utilities with
a push of a button.

THE BRAINS
CPU

Intel Pentium II 333MHz

L2 CACHE

51 2K pipeline burst

RAM

128MB SDRAM (384MB max)

Motherboard

Intel 440LX

THE BRAWN

Video

STB Velocity 1 28 with 4MB SGRAM

I Hard Drive

Seagate 9.0GB Cheetah SCSI

MPEG decoder

PCI SCSI controller

PCI Soundcard

PCI Shared/TV tuner

ISA Shared/TV tuner

CD-ROM

Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-M1102 IDE

Expansion Bus

One ISA, three PCI, one PCI/ISA shared, one AGP

Fax/Modem

Telepath 56.6Kbps X2-compatible (internal)

1/0 Ports
THE BEAUTY

Two serial, one parallel, two USB, MIDI/gameport,
dual PS/2

Case

Three 5.25-inch bays; two 3.5 inch-bays

Display

Gateway EV900-1 9-inch; .26mm dot pitch; aperture
grille; 1600x1200 max resolution, 85KHz max
refresh rate

Sound

Ensoniq AudioPCI (ESI 370) wavetable/FM soundcard

Speakers

Boston Acoustics Media Theatre; two satellites,
one subwoofer

Other

Chromatics MPEG decoder board; STB TV-tuner card
with video and still-image capture utilities

SPELUNKING WE WILL GO

Check it out: There’s enough room
inside the case to hide the entire
bootCrew. If expansion is your game,
this is the place to play.

THE BUNDLE Encarta I Entertainment Pack: The Puzzle
Collection I Greetings Workshop I Choice of Microsoft Action
Titles or Microsoft Professional

72 boot APR 98

PRESS YOUR LUCK

NIH3H.V.S

=I/V\i:i.:l

mm

The G6~333XLi<rpne
manly beastandis
chock-full- of top-notch
components. Put as
good asjt^is, it isn't
perfecT^fhere’s wiTT
TV-out pork

Price $4,299
Company Gateway 200
Phone 800.846.2000
URL www.gateway2000.com

r ortict

b breakdown of benchmark results is available
met. Point your browser to www.bootnet.com

The front panel looked suspiciously like a door. So in
typical bootFashion, we popped it off to discover part
of the G6-333XL’s cooling system hidden in behind.
Other cooling components include a huge heatsink arr
rear dissipation system.

NO ROOM AT THE INN

All the G6-233XL’s glory comes at a
cost: no free slots for you!

Muscular 333MHz processor

Adaptec 2940 Ultra Wide
SCSI Controller

Integrated TV tuner and
controls

Crammed with RAM

9.0GB Cheetah

3D acceleration

PCI audio

Cavernous case

24/7 Toll-free tech support

f CPU/MOTHERBOARD

bootMark

160

WIN95 APPS

SYSmark32

DIRECT3D

ForsakenMark

composite

65.72

HARD DRIVE

Adaptec Thread Mark v2.0

MB/sec

6.36

DVD-ROM

CD Tach/Pro V1.B5

K/sec

2320

WIN95 VIDEO

ActiveMovie

% played

100

DOS GAMING

Quake vl.06

tps

33

1 DIRECTX GAMING

| MDK PerfTest vl.4

147 j

1 MMX PROCESSING

1 DeBabelizer Pro

secs

196

I CPU/DISK

| Microsoft Visual C " compile ^ gg |

73

CD Rewritable Drives

Speed be damned

CD-RW drives are not the wave of the future. For starters, CD-RW media costs around
$20 per platter, compared to CD-R's $3 media. And CD-RW discs won't run on every
CD-ROM drive. The drive must be multi-read capable, like the Plextor 12/20Plex; unfortu-
nately most drives are not. And recording to CD-RW is as slow as reading from it.

While these drives claim to be 6x readers, they are not. Even the fastest one in this
roundup only benchmarks at 5x speed, while the rest wallow in the 4x range. If you can
stand the 2x speeds, these drives make acceptable CD-R recorders.

—Sean Cleveland

mm ®**. —

Hi-Val
HV6200 CD-RW
contains a cache buffer of
1MB and supports track-at-once
and disc-at-once.

Hi-Val HV 6200 CD-RW

Based on the Ricoh MP6200S drive, the
HV6200 includes almost everything you
need to get up and running. Everything
except a SCSI host adapter, that is.
Jumpers are also required, but mysteri-
ously not included.

Unlike the Nomai drive, the Hi-Val
benefits from Adaptec’s newest software-
DirectCD vl.Ol-which makes sense. The
drive only supports direct overwriting (files
are removed from the directory structure
but are not erased).

The HV6200 won the write performance
race, but didn’t do so well on reads. The
drive had no trouble reading CD-RW media
written on different manufacturers’ drives.
The HP may have a more robust feature
set, but you’ll have to sacrifice the Hi-Val’s
writing performance to enjoy them.

HP SureStore

CD-Writer Plus
71 1 0i

The CD-Writer Plus is the
only true CD-RW in this
roundup. Employing random
erase, the CD-Writer Plus is
mesmerizing, as disc space magically
appears as files are removed from the CD-
RW media.

Without disc-at-once recording you can’t
burn audio-only discs, and image files are
impossible. In fact, the CD-Writer Plus is
the only drive here that doesn’t include
any real recording software. The only way
to record data is by writing packets via
DirectCD. HP told us it couldn’t get the
disc-at-once feature right and thus opted
not to include it.

Regardless of this flaw, the HP per-
formed admirably. Redbook audio extrac-
tion was slow, but outperformed the
Maestro nonetheless. The HP nearly
reached 6x read times and was faster than
any other drive overall, but still failed to
deliver its promised speed.

Random-erase must increase file-system
overhead, because the CD-Writer Plus has
the least disc space to work with. Or HP
may have been conservative in its spare
block usage. Erasing and reformatting
discs on the CD-Writer Plus required the
most times of all these drives.

If true CD-RW support is important to
you and you don’t care about speed, this
is your drive. If CD-R is your priority,
forget CD-RW.

THE BUNDLE: Adaptec DirectCD 2.0 I
Adaptec Easy-CD Audio I Adaptec CD
Copier I Jewel Case Designer software I
IDE internal cable I One blank HP
CD-RW media

Price $449
Company Hewlett Packard
Phone 800.826.4111
URL www.hp.com/storage/
cd writer /index, html

Synchrome Maestro

CD-RW 2 x 6P

The Maestro is a truly portable CD-RW
drive running on the Extended EPP port.
But this comes at a price.

Although we had no trouble getting the
unit up and running, we saw temperamen-
tal behavior when trying to read CD-RW
media from different manufacturers. It
passed the benchmarks as expected, but

DirectCD 2.0 Part II
(JLIlb. Case of Les s S pace.)..

THE BUNDLE: Adaptec Easy CD Creator
3.0 Standard Edition I Adaptec
DirectCD vl .01 I One Verbatim
CD-R I One Verbatim CD-RW Media
I Internal 50-pin SCSI ribbon cable

Price $400
Company Hi-Val
Phone 714.953.3000
URL www.hival.com

DirectCD gives you the ability to copy files directly to a piece of media, either CD-
R or CD-RW, using Window’s Explorer, much like you would a hard drive, but at
floppy speeds. DirectCD 2.0 was not available when we last reviewed CD-
ReWritable drives (boot 12), where we covered the Philips OmniWriter (bootVerdict
7) and the Ricoh MediaMaster MP6200S (bootVerdict 8). These used DirectCD
vl .Os, which uses variable-length packets for greater compatibility with the
majority of CD-R drives.

With DirectCD 1 .0, the directory entry is removed when you delete a file, so the
file appears gone , but it’s actually still there, just not being displayed. Of course, no }
space is reclaimed. DirectCD 2.0 still uses variable-length when writing to CD-R discs
because it’s write-once media. However, it uses 32K fixed-length packets when writing to
CD-RW media. And since the packets are always the same length, they’re written in fixed
locations, making it easier to track files to support Random Erase, which removes deleted files ||
and frees up space on the media. Now, variable-length packets save space because the size of ui
the packet varies with the size of the data being written. Not all data is the same size. This
accounts for some of the lost space, but not all.

A typical piece of CD-RW media can be written to and erased an average of 1,000 times before it
becomes unusable, and bad spots will emerge. CD-RW drive manufacturers set aside different amounts
of spare blocks for defect mapping, so that if any worn spots develop, they can be remapped.

74 boot APR 98

/

The HP SureStore CD-
Writer Plus 71 lOi contains
a cache buffer of 768KB, and
supports track-at-once but not
disc-at-once.

S-Le-gs. WAilajLe.

All drives were tested with Adaptec’s 2940UW using a Seagate Barricuda Wide hard drive

redbook audio extraction
was horrendously slow,
taking twice as long as
other drives here. Disc
capacity was less than
that of the Ricoh drives,
and erasing was a start-
and-go-to-sleep affair.

Reads, although
faster than the Hi-Val
and Nomai drives,
put a heavy strain on
the CPU. When transfer-
ring data at 4x, it
consumes a whopping
80% of the load.

Included in the
bundle is a utility to
attach/detach the drive
in Windows, making it
easy to disconnect and
move to another
computer. A CD player is
also included, along with
SwissKnife for setting
interrupts, adjustable
transfer lengths, and
port access parameters
such as burst mode.

On the good side, the Maestro is the
only drive in this roundup with an external
play button on the front.

HiVal HV6200

Nomai 680.RW

Maestro 2 x 6P

HP CD-Writer 7110i

Interface

Internal SCSI

External SCSI

External Parallel

Internal EIDE

Drive

Ricoh MP6200S

Ricoh MP6200S

Wearnes WPI CDRW-622

HP CD-Writer+ 7100

Random Erase Capablities?

No

No

No

Yes

Recorder Tests

On-the-Fly Torture Test (mins)

16:42

Failed

17:55

18:01

Create 635MB image file (mins)

7:07

5:00

6:58

6:47

Burn 635MB image file (mins)

39:06

39:12

39:37

39:00

Digital Audio Extraction (KB/sec)

677

684

64

344

Time to Extract By Demons
Be Driven By Pantera (min)

0:46

0:54

2:32

2:21

Packet Writing (635MB) (hr)

1:18

1:10

1:36

0:45

Size of CD-RW Disc (MB)

596

601

579

463

Time to Erase a CD-RW Disc (mins)

38:24

38:32

54:17

56:12

CD Tach Read Tests

Read 1 6k Outside Tracks (K/sec)

728

855

858

973

Read 1 6k Center Tracks (K/sec)

694

836

862

968

Read 16k Inside Tracks (K/sec)

598

597

858

598

Full Stroke Seek (ms)

569

566

512

534

Random Access Seek (ms)

318

311

276

280

CPU Utilization @ 2x (300 K/sec)

30%

30%

52%

31%

CPU Utilization @ 4x (600 K/sec)

60%

57%

80%

41%

CPU Utilization @ 6x (900 K/sec)

Failed

Failed

Failed

45%

2K Burst (K/sec)

233

310

470

1244

8K Burst (K/sec)

49

49

65

59

16K Burst (K/sec)

100

103

114

119

CD Tach Drive Speed

4.3x

4.8x

4.9x

5.2x

THE BUNDLE: Adaptec Easy CD
Creator Standard Edition 1 Adaptec
DirectCD 2.0 1 One CD-R media
One Philips CD-RW media

Price $460
Company Synchrome
Technology
Phone 800.767.0085

URL www.synchrome.com

Nomai 680 .RW Drive

The external SCSI Nomai
680. RW, also based on
Ricoh’s MP6200S, is the only
drive in this round up that
comes with all the necessary
equipment. Unfortunately it’s
crippled with Easy CD Pro 2.0
(Adaptec hasn’t supported Easy
CD Pro for more than six months).

While faster than most of
the software in this
roundup, especially with
image-file-creation, Easy CD
Pro failed the On-the-Fly
Torture Test. DirectCD 2.0 is
also included, but because

the Ricoh only supports direct
overwrite and not random
erase, DirectCD has no effect
on performance. The drive
benchmarked close to the Hi-
Val, as expected, except its read
scores were a bit higher. If
Nomai updates the bundle, this
drive would be a good buy. Keep
your eyes open.

The Maestro CD-RW 2 x6P contains a
cache buffer of 768KB and supports
track-at-once and disc-at-once.

The Nomai
680.RW drive
contains a cache buffer
of 1MB and supports track-
at-once and disc-at-once.

THE BUNDLE: Adaptec Easy CD Pro
2.0 1 Adaptec DirectCD 2.0 1 Advansys PCI
Ultra SCSI Adapter (ABP 960U) I SCSI 25
pin to 25-pin external cable I SCSI 25-
pin to 50-pin external cable I Three
Nomai CD-R media I One Nomai CD-
RW media I Carrying case

Price $649
Company Nomai
Phone 408.542.5900
URL www.nomai.com

APR 98 boot 75

CorelDraw 8’s new Interactive Drop Shadow tool even includes feathering
options to control the softness of the shadow.

get the files. We were
also disappointed to find
that Trendy, the suite’s
coolest font set, was cor-
rupted and wouldn’t load.

The remainder of
CorelDraw 8’ s enhance-
ments address “productiv-
ity.” We’re talking
features such as on-the-fly
color mixing, rotatable
guidelines, savable work-
space environments, and
easier selection of buried
objects. The list goes on,
but it’s not the exciting
stuff that makes creative

CorelDraw 8

New ideas are running thin

While CorelDraw 8 offers
more precision controls
than any computer artist
would ever care to digest,
the enormous illustration
suite doesn’t redefine itself
enough to justify a full version jump. The
latest iteration of the vaunted vector app
focuses on time-saving interface enhance-
ments and streamlined special-effects
tools, but offers few innovations that will
actually change the look of your artwork at
the end of the day.

The most impressive updates are two
labor-saving tools that help you quickly
execute standard illustration tricks. The
Interactive Drop Shadow tool automatical-
ly creates a shadow, then lets you adjust
its placement and darkness with a few
glides of the mouse. Feathering and
opacity controls sit conveniently on the
main interface’s property bar (which
changes on-the-fly according to the tool
you’re using). Perhaps most importantly,
text objects can be edited as text after
you’ve applied your shadow— try doing
that in Adobe Photoshop .

CorelDraWs 3D extrusion tools have
always been powerful but clumsy. The
Interactive Extrude Tool changes all that,
with mouse and property bar controls for
depth, perspective, light-sourcing, and
bevels. We reckon you’ll cut your extruding
labor by 300% with this long-overdue
streamlining. Unfortunately, the other inter-
active tools either didn’t need to become
“interactive” or are downright useless. The
new blend and envelope tools offer no sig-
nificant interface benefits over their prede-
cessors and are conducive to amateurish
art. The Interactive Distort tool is the worst

The new packed-in plug-ins are almost cooler than CorelDraw itself.

of the bunch.

Sure, you can
use it to
tweak an
object’s
vector points
en masse
according to
a particular
algorithm,
but who’d
want to? This
hyper-sensi-
tive tool
leaves both
art and text
unrecognizable, and does little more than
suggest that computer illustration is more
about mathematics than beauty.

The only other new vector manipula-
tion gizmo is the Knife tool, which lets
you bisect closed-path objects according
to your own freehand drawing path. You
might need this effect, oh, once every
three leap years. It seems Corel is running
out of vector illustration innovations, and
it’s no surprise that in this age of
Photoshop , Painter , and Goo, the suite
now comes packed with more bitmap
plug-ins than ever before. Notables
include Squizz (a Goo ripoff), Alchemy (for
Painter-e sque brushstroke effects), and
Fractal Explorer (for Kai Kraussian hippie-
rave backgrounds). You also get the appli-
cation software for Auto F/X Photo/Graphic
Edges— an awesome plug-in that quickly
applies artistic borders around square
images— but not the actual edge files. This
is a glaring omission, especially consider-
ing the edge embargo isn’t mentioned on
the product packaging and there’s no doc-
umentation on where to

Extrusion depth and angle can now be adjusted via
interactive sliders.

types drool. Overall, the suite benefits
from the awesome CorelDraw legacy and is
an incredible value, but don’t go for the
upgrade unless your boss is paying for it.
This latest version is for professionals (as
the $700 price tag attests) who need to
work faster. Casual consumers can get by
fine with version 7.

—Jon Phillips

Bisect any
closed path
object with the
Knife tool and
each separate half
will close up again
according to the path you
created. Hooray!

Price $700 ($250 upgrade)
Company Corel
Phone 800.772.6735
URL www.corel.com

76 boot APR 98

QuarkXPress 4.0

Six years in Tibet

anartl Graeme. | gg(W>*tn4 | _.<C\HyPoc™ | lyMoowft Wod H fequaittgW.. ftPhotdaped C* .| 4

The tools may look the same in QuarkXPress 4.0, but you won’t find these
sleek bezier curves in any past version.

When you make the dominant
product in a genre and take six
years to come out with a new
version, expectations are
bound to be high. Such is the
case with QuarkXPress— and
expectations are sky high.

Unfortunately the reality is
closer to sea level.

Despite adding a reputed
75 new “features” (many of
which are merely cosmetic),
this long-awaited update may
be more closely defined by
the features not added, most
notably: Internet support. In
the face of PageMaker 6.5' s
array of web features,

Xpress' s dependence on third-
party solutions seems behind the times.

But while you may need to invest in
other software for your online repurposing,
you just might save that money by not
having to buy Freehand or Illustrator for
your more mundane bezier chores. The
robust pen tools in Quark 4.0 make creating
custom shapes a snap. Pictures can be
imported, text can be bound,
and gradient fills and custom
strokes can be applied to
these smooth boxes. Need a
logo fast? Text can be con-
verted to outlines in a single
step for custom font manipu-
lation (this conversion also
allows you to print the
document without the font
resource). Measurement bar
icons let you control point and segment
types. Handy! Most impressively, bezier
objects can be combined or split with a
powerful set of merge options that rival
Adobe’s Pathfinder feature.

The intuitive (perhaps the most intuitive
to date) implementation of these tools are
without doubt Quark 4.0's shining moment.

Overall, the Xpress interface feels the
same, but underneath the surface the com-
pletely rewritten engine received a massive

infusion of intelligence. This is evident in
the new tabbed boxes that keep all your
options within reach and in the smarter
context-sensitive menus and tools. For
example, the long-running rivalry between
the Item and Content tool has been
somewhat defused by reducing restrictions
of each. Now the Content tool can select
more than one item
and you can Get
Picture when you’re
using the Item tool.
Aaahhh!

Text overflow is
now flagged with a
bright red tag. And
Apply buttons let you
preview the effect of
dialogue boxes before
committing to them. And transparent boxes
stay that way during text editing.

Another moment of inspiration was the
decision to make Keep Document Settings
the default.

Despite grumblings centering on printing
issues, backward compatibility, and saving
to network drives (most of which have
been corrected with Quark's latest patch),
this new version of Quark takes distinct
steps toward being the end-all-be-all of
DTP apps. Here’s hoping we don’t
have to wait until the year 2004
for the next upgrade.

—Brad Dos land

Once you’ve converted text to outlines in
Quark 4.0, a world of merging options arises.

Capable color controls allow you to modify imported
images to your taste.

Price $995
Company Quark
Phone 800.676.4575
URL www.quark.com

Your

• Your System
Crashes .

Product Information Number 122

APR 98 boot 77

Flight Unlimited II

On a wing and a prayer eT checkLIST

At first glance, Flight Unlimited
II shares little with the original.
The entire flight model was
rebuilt, abandoning fluid-
dynamics simulation in favor
of the more conventional
data-table approach. Flight
Unlimited had the gut-feel of
flight, while Flight Unlimited II goes for
the minutiae of modern aviation.

Though you’re limited to the San
Francisco Bay Area, the sim includes 486
airports. And the scenery is an absolute
gas, from the crumpled-velvet mountains
of Marin County to the l-can-see-my-

house
textures of
San

Francisco
and Silicon
Valley.
Buildings
over ten
stories are
depicted in
3D, via the
ZOAR
graphics
engine.

3D buildings are limited, but details
such as clouds make it all look real.

Flight Unlimited II
Version: 2.0

Max Res/Color 1024x768/1 6-bit

Win95 Native

3D Acceleration

Glide Direct3D

DirectX

DirectDraw

DirectSound

Specialty Controllers

Flightsticks Force feedback
Throttle

The Golden Gate never looked so good. Note Flight Unlimited IPs detailed prop disc.

Sound is
also used to
good effect: engine noise pans as you
turn your head and radio chatter is dead-
on, from traffic procedures to bitingly
sarcastic comments from the tower.

Aerodynamics are more realistic than the
competition. You can’t slow-roll the Beaver
float plane, the Piper Arrow is appropriately
nimble, and the P51 Mustang feels like the
fire-breathing monster it should be.

Viewing modes are also top-notch. You
can select either VFR instrument display,
showing just the dials pilots use most of
the time, or the full IFR panel. Instruments
are inert in the virtual-cockpit mode, but
the info you need is in a text display at the
bottom of the screen.

Aircraft graphics are serviceable, though
not as detailed as other sims. But even here

there are neat touches, like the intricately
shaded transparent propeller animation.

Of course, you’ll need major machinery
to get this bird off the flight line. Even with
3Dfx under the hood, we had to drop some
detail and back off to 512x384 resolution
before frame rates hit the double-digits on
a plain, old Pentium. However, Pentium II
owners are going to be in nirvana.

—Frank Lenk

Price $50

Developer Looking Glass
Studios

Publisher Eidos
Interactive
Phone 415.547.1200
URL www.eidos-
interactive.com

bool

'•'Uet

Pro Pilot

Learning to fly

Obviously rushed out for last
Christmas, Sierra Pro Pilot sneaked
in on a wing and a prayer. Too
bad, because the raw edges
conceal the product’s real virtues.

By modeling only the continen-
tal United States and a sliver of
eastern Canada, Pro Pilot guaran-
tees that no matter where you fly, you’ll
find believable scenery. From about 3,000
feet up, it works, despite an occasional
glint of polygon cracking. At up to 256
square pixels, terrain textures contain
meaningful real-world detail.

At lower altitudes, the illusion fades.
The game lacks 3D acceleration, so
terrain breaks up into a checkerboard
of half-acre pixels.

Also, there are just eight fixed internal
views and four configurable exterior
views. Cockpit detail is crisp, but a true

CHECK

CIST

Max Res/Color 640x480/8-bit

DirectSound

Multiple CDs

Specialty Controllers

Force feedback Throttle
Rudder

Prepare for a water landing with Pro Pilot.

virtual
cockpit
would

have been better, as would the ability
to pan the outside view dynamically.

On the plus side, numeric instrument
read-outs are available in views where
the instruments aren’t.

At up to 500 polygons, aircraft are well
rendered, but the selection of planes is
oddly constricted, with three Beechcraft,
including two big corporate twins; the
Cessna Citation bizjet; and the inevitable
Cessna 172.

Still, the bells and whistles make it
worthwhile. You can create complex flight

plans, and air traffic
control voices will keep
you to them. A copilot will
tell you where to go and
pop up a GPS map to
show where you are.

Unfortunately, these
slick features are a pain to
figure out. The included
“Flight Companion” is
thick but contains nothing
about how to operate Pro
Pilot itself. All vital info is buried in
readme files.

Frame rates cruise comfortably in the
teens even on a low-end Pentium, but the
pauses for texture loading can be endless.

Still, when it comes to cross-country
navigation, Pro Pilot is the new
flight leader.

—Frank Lenk

Price $60

Developer Dynamix
Publisher Sierra On-Line
Phone 800.757.7707
URL www.sierra.com

78 boot APR 98

laTjRvfl

Twinkling Trinitrons

Bright-ass Sonys ain’t aperture-grille phonies

Everybody is selling aperture-grille monitors these days, but only Sony and Mitsubishi
actually make the cathode-ray tubes that ship in these babies. Unlike shadow-mask tech-
nology, which shoots electrons through a grid, aperture-grille technology shoots electrons
through unbroken vertical stripes that allow more light to pass through, resulting in
brighter displays. Sony has just updated its Trinitron line, and since podunk monitor
manufacturers will inevitably license all this weird science and stick it inside their own
plastic, we thought it best to review the Sony-branded CRTs first. The
GDM-400PS houses the first 19-inch aperture-grille CRT. The
G DM- 500 PS is the new 21-inch Trinitron flagship.

—Jon Phillips

Sony’s new 19-inch GDM-400PS is
bright, true, and flat, flat, flat —
a wonderful alternative to the
bulbous Hitachi shadow-mask
CRT in every 19-incher that
shipped last year. The Hitachi-
based monitors kick ass, but
the world needs an aperture-grille 19-incher.

The 400PS offers an 18-inch viewable,
does 1600xl200@75Hz and 1280X1024@
85Hz, and displays brilliant color.

Display Mate's Video Obstacle Course
revealed impeccable color consistency
throughout all portions of the screen, and
geometric distortion was imperceptible.
Color convergence was just shy of perfec-
tion, displaying only the most niggling
green-red misalignment.

With a varying grille pitch of 0.25mm
in the center of the display widening to
0.27mm on the edges, pixel sharpness was
excellent but deteriorated slightly on the
corners during focus tests. Nonetheless,
0.27mm is still a fine pitch, you’ll probably
never notice the scaling during everyday use.

The 400PS costs $250 more than its
cheapest 19-inch competition and is worth
the price if you need the brightest, flattest
monitor in this size category. Whites beam
radiantly, blacks are dark as midnight, and
colors crackle with intensity. And at just 55
lbs. and 17.5x18.5x18 inches, the 400PS
feels more like a 17-incher thanks to the
new “short-neck” design. But the display
isn’t perfect: The grille makes fine horizon-
tal lines look much thicker and brighter
than vertical lines of exactly the
same width. The effect

became very apparent
working with hair-
lines in vector-
based drawing
programs. The
phenomenon
is intrinsic to all

The first aperture-grille
19-incher ever.

Price $1,100 (19"),

$1,800 (21")

Company Sony
Phone 800.352.7669
URL www.ita.sel.sony.com

aperture-grille
displays (along with
the two fine damper first monitor we’ve

wire shadows running seen with no

horizontally across ""convergence.

the screen), but

we’ve never seen it this pronounced before.

The 21-inch GDM-500PS shares the
exacting detail and brilliance of its smaller
brother. You get the 0.25mm to 0.27mm
variable grille pitch, 19.8 inches viewable
across an extremely flat screen, and
1600xl200@85Hz. DisplayMate testing
revealed amazing clarity: excellent color
purity, zero geometric distortion, and
great pixel detail. Like the 400PS, the
500PS makes fine horizontal lines look
thicker and brighter than vertical lines of
the same width. But unlike the 19-incher,
color convergence was absolutely perfect.

Aside from the line-intensity inconsisten-
cy, the only issue that keeps these
nearly identical units from 10
bootVerdicts is their price. Each
needs to be $200 cheaper.

Most of your machine
was built from scratch,

but it's fast. Very fast.

MMX -that was last year.

2 gig drives - okay for sissies.

Your PC rocks.

But, you've got a dirty secret.

That monster on your desk crashes.

Crashes hard.

So, what are you going to do?

Get Checkit.

It'll tell you what's wrong with your hardware.
It'll give you information. Detailed stuff.

The average guy won't understand it.

But you will.

Checkit tests your hardware.

It benchmarks.

It compares what your system looks like today,
to what it looked like a month ago.

It also backs up Registry and system files.
Insurance for the next time you pop the lid,
and slam in another computer show special.

Just get Checkit. Get it OOW.

Because a fast machine that's dead,

is just plain dead.

Product Information Number 123

tat a PalmPilot?

Enter to win at our web site:

www. checkit. com/pilotbtl. htm

Checkit is widely available at retail stores and catalogs everywhere!

COMP

VfouchStone

SOFTWARE CORPORATION

© 1998 Touchstone Soltware Corp. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Touchstone, the Touchstone
logo and Check, and Checkit ate registered trademarks of Touchstone Software Corporation.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners

APR 98 boot 79

Battlespire: An Elder Scrolls Legend

W checkLId I

Battlespire: An Elder Scrolls Legend
Version: 1.0

Multiplayer

LAN IPX

Trapped in a pixilated dungeon

The latest Elder Scrolls adventure is a
tepid rehash of last year’s much-bally-
hooed, but beleaguered, Daggerfall. All
the elements of a great RPG are here, but
Battlespire just can’t escape from the pit
of mediocrity. The dated graphics will fill
you with 1996 nostalgia, the ill-wrought
battle/dialogue interface will make your
teeth hurt, and the slow pace of the game
will sedate many a rabid adventurer. The
exquisitely crafted and detailed character-
generation system seems out of place in
the pixilated depths of Battlespire.

the m>

LIST

Max Res/Color 640x480/1 6-bit

Foul fiends run amok in the tedious
bowels of Battlespire.

problems cause weapons to
disappear into walls, and odious
perspective correction will cause
creatures to bloat in the head
and shrink in the ankles when
you look down at them. High-res
mode only brings pain and frus-
tration as frame rates churn at
5fps with a host of sprites on
screen. Low resolution brings a
much improved, but still abhor-
rent, 20fps.

The shining star of Battlespire
is the charac-

Battlespire ’s denizens may be pixilated, but they’ll wallop your ass.

ter generator;
you can fashion even
the minutest detail
of your character,
from facial expressions
to a horde of skills,
abilities, and equipment.
Ripped from Daggerfall ,
the character generator
is the sweet icing on a
stale cake.

Battlespire may be multiplayer (via
Mpath or IPX), but it seems out of place
in an RPG that depends so heavily on
mood and intricate puzzles. Be that as it

may, Battlespire is lost in the times,
unable to catch up to the competing
market. Let’s hope that the next Elder
Scrolls adventure takes full use PC tech-
nology to create a remotely com-
pelling game experience.

—Dan Simpson

Price $55
Company Bethesda
Phone 800.677.0700
URL www.bethsoft.com

Those of you hoping to
bust out with 3D-accelerated
haughtiness will be disap-
pointed. Dust off those VESA drivers,
because Battlespire doesn’t support
3D acceleration. Anchored by pixilated
textures and sprites, Battlespire 1 s clipping

CHECKl

ie Rebellion

Tone Rebellion

A pretty mish-mash

The Tone Rebellion attempts to put a new
spin on the already-overcrowded strategy
genre by mixing in adventure elements.
Unfortunately, it falls short in both genres.

The game starts strong with a well-
thought-out story line. The floaters’ (who

in futility. You want to find the Leviathan
just to feed them to him.

The Tone Rebellion is pretty to
look at, with its hand-drawn 2D-sprite
graphics. Each island has a unique
atmosphere, and exploring them is about
the only reason to continue playing.

The hauntingly beautiful music is
superb and keeps pace with the
elegance of the different worlds. When
you blow something up, the explosions
sound realistic and give your sub-
woofer a workout.

While The Tone Rebellion is beautiful,
its gameplay becomes annoyingly repeti-
tive within a few short hours. If you’re
looking for a good strategy game, try
something with a different tone.

—Paula Reaume

Price $50

Developer The Logic
Factory

Publisher Virgin
Interactive
Phone 408.625.1004
URL www.vie.com

vaguely resemble jellyfish) island universe
has been shattered by the evil Leviathan,
and over time, different tribes have formed,
each with unique abilities. Your job is to
defeat the Leviathan and reunite the
floaters’ shattered world.

reunite

c

In The Tone Rebellion you need
to unite the shattered island
universe and save the floaters
from the evil Leviathan.

The Ton
Version:

0E

Max Res/Color 640x480/8-bit

Win95/NT Compatible

DirectX

DirectDraw

DirectPlay

DirectSound

Directlnput

Multiplayer

LAN Modem
TCP/IP

The floaters are trying to blow up one of the many Leviathan
spawners you’ll encounter in The Tone Rebellion.

Beyond this, the game fails to fully plumb
the depths of the story. The strategy

elements turn into a slug-fest,
and the adventure is no more
than a treasure hunt. You have
no opportunity to upgrade
weapons or discover new
resources. You can eventually
upgrade certain buildings, but it
doesn’t affect the game. The
floaters’ Al is so badly crippled
that you end up completely frus-
trated— getting the little guys to
do what you want is an exercise

80 boot APR 98

*11

Jl

COMPANY

URL/PHONE #

PAGE

NUMBER

PRODUCT

INFO

NUMBER

COMPANY

URL/PHONE #

PAGE

NUMBER

PRODUCT

INFO

NUMBER

3Dfx

www.3dfx.com

40

372

Micron Electronics, Inc.

www.mel.micron.com

10

232

American Institute for

Microsoft

www.microsoft.com

4

Computer Science

www.aics.com

94

New World Technologies

www.nwt.com

59

254

ATI

www.atitech.com

17

85

NRI Schools

www.mhcec.com

93

—

Creative Labs

www.creativelabs.com

C4

96

Ocean of America

www.oceanltd.com

51

261

D.I.C.E.

www.dice.com

95

106

PowerQuest Corporation

www.powerquest.com

26

281

Dell Computer

www.dell.com/buydell

28

—

Psygnosis

www.psygnosis.com

22

279

ForeFront Direct

(800)475-5831

94

134

Real 3D

www.real3d.com

20

117

Iomega Corporation

www.iomega.com

37

181

Ripcord Games

www.ripcordgames.com

24

-

Iomega Corporation

www.iomega.com

39

183

Softman Products

www.cheapsoftware.net

94

313

Jazz Multimedia

www.jazzmm.com

C3

187

Touchstone Software

(714)969-7746

77

122

MediaOn/Artek

www.mediaon.com

C2

236

Touchstone Software

(714)969-7746

79

123

X

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Si

Pages Made Easy

Code away!

Web coding keeps getting simpler and more accessible. Below we l
ook at two development tools geared mainly toward the novice and
educational markets. Digital Chisel, unique and ambitious, is built
completely with Java native code. Agile has the potential to be a
great starting point for those just beginning and wishing to make
pages that are compliant to a particular HTML version.

— Tara Calishain

Digital Chisel

The latest incarnation of
Digital Chisel is as confusing
as it is powerful. It has a
mighty Workbench for creating
content, but only Digital Chisel
users can see it. Its WYSIWYG HTML editor
is designed for beginners, but you can’t
resize graphics with it.

Digital Chisel is also ambitious— it’s

written com-
pletely in
Java. That’s
good for
platform
indepen-
dence but
bad for fast
loading—
there was a
noticeable
wait on our
Pentium 150

Digital Chisel offers different inter- with 96MB
faces based on user level. of RAM. And

while Digital Chisel was 77?e Workbench takes some mystery out of making Java Beans, but the resulting
created as an educational/ content isn’t viewable by any browser except Digital Chisel ’s.
classroom tool, most

schools won’t have the recommended P133
with 32MB of RAM. But as an educational
item, Digital Chisel rates strongly. Its three
eye-catching interfaces— elementary, middle,
and advanced— are appropriate for each
age group (elementary has larger icons,
while advanced has extra tools).

The HTML editor works well in all envi-
ronments. A project-management screen
shows a web site as a series of pages and
delineates the links between them. Click on
a page and you’re taken to an HTML editor.

A standout item in the editor is the
Workbench, which lets you combine Java
elements and create Java Beans— Java
content within pages. It’s an excellent way
to put Java capabilities within the author’s
reach. Once pages are created, Digital
Chisets publishing tool compresses and
copies the material for e-mailing or FTPing.

That’s the good news. The bad news is
that while Java applets can be inserted into

a Digital Chisel page and are viewable
without problems, content created using the
Workbench is not, at this writing, viewable
by any browser except Digital Chisets,
which, while adequate, is no substitute for
IE or Navigator and minimizes the potential
audience for Workbench content.

Schools that need to serve several
levels of HTML knowledge, or families that
want to have one HTML editor for everyone,
will appreciate Digital Chisets strong
educational slant and different levels
of presentation. Digital Chisel
pushes the envelope but ulti-
mately falls short.

Price $199

Developer Pierian Spring
Software

Phone 800.213.5054
URL www.pierian.com

Agile

Agile dishes up a happy
medium between the markup
control of a WYSIWYG editor
and memorizing HTML code.

The program’s non-WYSIWYG
interface feels like a text editor, with
basic <HTML> and <BODY> tags to get
started. Type in code directly and it’ll

the

you

take

? E*> £* S>*± Facuwa g*

DltSlHlJW v l»-|r|M| Bt| b|v| -;|;=| htmli.

<>l "l°hl F II |WXHTML12 Zj

1 DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//MC//HTD HTML 3

title>HTHL 3.2 Reference Specification

:body bgcolor-"#rFT6FO"

I* "recta®, jpg’*

•"# 000000 "

Agile's context-sensitive HTML help gives you tons of
tag information.

on user-configurable
colors for easy editing,
or enter your code and
format it via the menu-
bar. Frequently used
code can be saved as a
template or a “Snippet.’

Agile can create
code for a variety of
standards, from HTML

2.0 to IE 4.0. In
addition, Agile offers
HTML-context help and
references for under-
standing the markups.

This convenience is
underscored by the
ability to right click on
any HTML markup to set its properties. For
example, on the HTML 2.0 setting, you can
only insert a horizontal rule. On the HTML

4.0 setting, you can insert a horizontal rule
and adjust its properties. Agile also adjusts
menus to reflect your HTML version (the 2.0

t fiTfi

tpecltleac lon</

New filar* Wrrdow
Wndow Showing Link
Ra*eite ReWorohlpj gerentWaidow

Right-clicking in Agile gives you quick
access to a tag’s properties.

standard removes the frame
commands from the menus, for
example). Once you’ve finished
coding, click once to preview
the page in a browser.

A couple of things distract
from Agile's friendliness.
“Snippet” is not listed in the
help files index, for example,
and adding a snippet is not
intuitive. Adding tables and
frames can also be a hassle for
the novice. But overall Agile is
a solid program— plenty of
extras for the pro,
plenty of support
for the novice.

Price $75

Company Compware
Phone N/A
URL www. compware.
demon.co.uk

82 boot APR 98

Compaq Presario 4860

New chip, same problems

composite

MMX PROCESSING

DeBabelizer Pro .

Price $2,499
Company COMPAQ
Phone 800.345.1518
URL www.compaq.com

wV filet

The Presario 4860 is
Compaq’s high-end PC.

But compared to other
offerings, its performance
and execution won’t bode
well for real PC enthusiasts.

Active Desktop eats CPU
power

AGP soldered on motherboard
LPX motherboard

THE BRAINS

Intel Pentium II 333MHz

32MB SynchDRAM (256MB max)

Intel 440LPX

THE BRAWN

PCI Shared

Various 6.5GB EIDE

Hitachi 2x

Expansion Bus Two PCI, three ISA, one shared

Fax/Modem

56Kbps K56flex-compatible

Two USB, one parallel, two serial,
RCA video-in and audio-out, one i
microphone-in

The Pentium II 300MHz-
equipped Presario 4850 (reviewed in
boot 17) proved quite the little power-
house. Unfortunately, the system was
none-too-bright in terms of design. But
with Intel’s Deschutes quickly making
the rounds of system OEMs, the 4850
has been sent out to pasture. Taking
its place is the Presario 4860.

So what’s the diff? Well, aside from
the obvious processor punch and
updated video drivers, not much. In
fact, all the problems associated with
the 4850, including the dreaded LPX
formfactor, insane case design, and
soldered-on-the-motherboard-so-
there’s-no-way-in-hell-you’ll-ever-be-
able-to-upgrade-the-AGP video card, are
still here. Perhaps it was too ambitious
to expect Compaq to completely over-
haul the system in a couple of months.

Frankly, we can’t help but be disap-
pointed with the 4860. While its per-

one game/MIDI,
one monitor, stereo-out,

THE BEAUTY
Display

Sound

Optional 1725S 17-inch screen with built-in
JBL speakers

Speakers

ESS1887 FM-synth only

Other

JBL Pro stereo speakers (on monitor only)

Volume control on monitor and case

THE BUNDLE Wing Commander IV (DVD) I Incoming
(AGP-enhanced) I Moto Racer I Photo Express I Money 9?
Bookshelf 98 I Encarta 98 Encyclopedia

formance improved upon the 4850’s,
the increase wasn’t significant. The
bootMark of 157 (up from 144.7)
was right on the money with
other Deschutes systems
we’ve seen. Quake was all
of lfps faster, and our C++
compile took 30 seconds
less (22% faster). But while
the 4860 was noisily toiling
away with our
SYSmark32 test
(eventually scoring
a seemingly respectable 278),
the similarly equipped and priced
NEC Direction SPL 333 (reviewed
in boot 19), scored a nerve-
rattling 429. Holy-wack-a-moley.

And if you hate the pre-
installed Active Desktop, you can
uninstall the whole shebang-
including IE 4.0— but only with
about five or six mouse clicks. We
noticed a miniscule performance
increase after doing this, but then our
system became unstable (SYSmark32
choked big time), giving credence to
Microsoft’s assertion that IE 4.0 is a
part of Win95. Good thing Compaq
includes quick-restore disks.

We harped on Compaq last time for
not including a TV-out port, and we’ll
lob whine again. Because the 4860 uti-
lizes a soft-DVD solution, Compaq must
integrate the copy protection (normally
built into the decoder chip) into the
software. As
such, even if
you installed
another PCI
video card with
TV-out (a la
Canopus’s
Pure3D), you’re
pretty much
SOL. You can’t
override the
.onboard video.

One victory:
the 4860’s

software bundle is killer —
especially the copy of Rage
Software’s yet-to-be-released
AGP-enhanced game
Incoming. This, not the
processor, was the biggest
surprise overall.

— Bryan Del Rizzo

CPU/MOTHERBOARD

bootMark . __

157

Compaq

WIN95 APPS

SYSmark32

DIRECT3D

ForsakenMark

HARD DRIVE

Adaptec ThreadMark v2.0 ^72

CD-ROM

CD Tach/Pro vl. 65 „

WIN95 VIDEO

ActiveMovie

% played

100

DOS GAMING

Quake vl.06

DIRECTX GAMING

MDK PerfTest vl.4

25.6

CPU/DISK

Microsoft Visual C” compile ^

Pentium II 333MHz with
enormous heatsink
AGP 2x ATI Rage Pro
DVD-ROM

Software bundle rocks!
Programmable one-touch
buttons

Hard drive capacity
Video playback

A complete breakdown of benchmark results is available
on the bootNet. Point your browser to www.bootnet.com

APR 98 boot 83

Applica U2

Two hearts beat as one

Like many households these days, you
probably have one nice computer with a
net connection and two or more people
who want to use it— usually at the same
time. What are your options, aside from
buying a second system? There’s a lot of
buzz regarding the network computer
lately, but who wants to drop a grand on
a computer without storage? You could
time-share, or get the Applica U2.

The U2 is a combination polled PnP ISA
card (which doesn’t rape you of an IRQ)
tethered by a 15-foot RJ-45 cable (optional
50-foot cable available) to a break-out box
with VGA, and PS/2 mouse and mini-DIN
keyboard ports. Once installed, simply run
the Control Center and voila— an instant
second virtual station complete with multi-
user login and preferences and a maximum
resolution of 800x600/16-bit. There’s even
a messaging system so users can commu-
nicate with each other. A P166 with 32MB
is recommended, but not required.

So what can you do with it? Most
anything you can do now with your current
system, sans audio. Guessing that the

Internet will be the
primary focus, we
loaded up Netscape
Communicator on both the host
and station, and it worked flawlessly.

Keep in mind that the bandwidth of your
connection is now shared, so expect less
throughput. Version 1.30 has some quirks,
but they’re being addressed, and the
soon-to-be-released version 2.0 should fix
them. For example, no MS-DOS box capa-
bilities are available on the station; also
our Logitech mouse preferences didn’t
work on either terminal and it seems to
have some difficulty with Norton 3.0
Utilities. Though it’s not sold as a gaming
platform, we tried to run Quake on the
U2— unsuccessfully. Neither GLQuake
server nor WinQuake ran. In hardware
mode, Quake II ran on the server only.
Using software mode, it ran on both, but
it was unplayably slow.

But for most users, this seems like the
ideal solution to make a single-user OS
feel like a multiuser OS fairly painlessly
and inexpensively.

Too bad all
internal cards
weren’t pulled to
free up IRQ resources.

What if you want more that
one external user? Applica U3 adds
guessed it) two users, and Applica
Workgroup adds up to four users
per card, with the only limitation being
ISA slots.

—Daevid Vincent

Price $250
Company Concurrent
Controls

Phone 800.487.2243
URL www.applica.com

Nightmare Creatures fei IST

^ Version: 1.0

Afflicted with schizophrenia

In the current spate of genre-mixing games,
Nightmare Creatures is crushed beneath the
weight of its own ambitions. Part adventure
game, part fighting game, and part platform
game, Nightmare Creatures suffers from a
mixed-identity that never manages to sort
itself out. Taking gothic horror to places
it should never have gone, Nightmare
Creatures skulks the gaslit streets of 19th-
century London.
Steeped in a
brooding atmos-
phere, Nightmare
Creatures con-
tains some seri-
ously disturbing
and horrifying
creatures.

Sharp

graphics are
a boon, with

_ .... Direct3D

Be prepared to wipe bloody enhancements
entrails off your swords, 'cause enhancements

the body count in Nightmare an ° acceleration
Creatures is plenty high. for PowerVR.

Maximum Resolution/Color

1024x768/1 6-bit

Win95 Native

3D Acceleration

Direct3D

Native 3D Hardware Support

PowerVR

DirectX

DirectDraw

DirectPlay

DirectSound

Directlnput

Specialty Controllers

Win95 compatible

Nightmare
Creatures tran-
sitions to the
PC with flying
colors at
640x480/16-bit
(up to 1024x768/

16 bit) with fil-
tering and anti-
aliasing effects,

putting its console counterpart to shame.
Characters are composed of 600 polygons,
and enemies are sharply animated and
fluid. Still, sharp graphics will push a game
only so far.

The biggest strike against Nightmare
Creatures is the heinous control. Precise
control, particularly important with fighting
games, is absent. Instead, characters react
herky-jerky from even the slightest touch
and swipe air long after their opponents
have fallen. Even maneuvering your charac-
ter in front of power-ups can be a chore.
This, combined with a wildly spinning
camera, turns Nightmare Creatures into a

Detailed textures and eerie city streets create a
brooding atmosphere heavy with tension.

gory mishmash of half-baked genres.

Nightmare Creatures attempts to do too
many things at once, and comes up short
on all fronts. The thin storyline and weak
adventure puzzles won’t hold the average
gamer for long. Top it off with some frus-
trating controls, and Nightmare Creatures is
an all-around disappointment.

—Dan Simpson

Price $50
Developer Kallisto
Publisher Activision
Phone 310.255.2000
URL www.activision.com

84 boot APR 98

Pocket Picture Power

Perfect pixel postcards

As much as we may drool over the megapixels of today's burliest digital cameras , one
fact remains: the most powerful camera is the one you have with you when you need it
Even Kodak's $15,000 pro camera doesn't do you a lick of good if it's sitting in the bag
back in the hotel room when the UFO lands.

The key to this sort of power is size, or lack thereof. Sometimes the ability to tuck
a camera in your shirt pocket means more than all the resolution in the world.

—Brad Dosland

Toshiba PDR-2

It’s a PC card... It’s a digital camera... It’s
two, two, two peripherals in one. Actually,
it’s Toshiba confronting the challenge of
integrating a hardware interface into a
pocket-size part. The solution: attach a flip-
out PC card to the back of the camera.

This decision has its pros and cons.

First and foremost, you currently need a
PC card slot to use the camera (Toshiba
promises a floppy drive adapter, but none
was available at press time).

This means you’re limited to
using it with a notebook or
buying an exotic PC card drive
for your desktop PC. Another
option is a SmartMedia reader,
such as the one featured in this
month’s Pure Lust (page 18).

And on one hand, the
integrated design lets you
leave the cables at home and
travel unencumbered. But the
addition of the card makes the

formfactor a quarter-inch thicker than
Umax’s offering. Still, the PDR-2 is fully
pocketable (even in tight blue jeans).

Another size concession was the 3v
lithium battery instead of AAAs. While
battery life is slightly longer, finding a
replacement in the field is a real bitch.

Also, the PDR-2 weighs 50% more
than the PhotoRun, tipping the scales at
over 6 ounces. Still, this camera is no
heavyweight, although you’d never know it
from the images.
With the
included Image
Expert software,
you can simply
drag-and-drop
the 640x480 24-
bit images onto
your hard drive
from the svelte
2MB SmartMedia.
The camera
holds 24 images

While the PDR-2 has brighter colors, its images
suffer from motion blur . . . even in direct
window light.

Price $399
Company Toshiba
Phone 800.288.1354
URL www.toshiba.com

No, the back of Toshiba’s PDR-2
doesn’t open to accept film — that’s
the PC card interface swinging out, sister.

at its highest res, four times the
PhotoRun’s capacity, and up to 48 images
in standard mode. And the PDR-2 comes
with a second 2MB SmartMedia
card, a considerate gesture
more companies ought
to consider.

Umax PhotoRun

Easily the smallest digital
camera this side of Mission:
Impossible, the PhotoRun
makes Palm’s pocketable PDA
feel big, weighing in at 4
ounces. Unfortunately, this
minute size comes at a price.

Neither camera in this
roundup comes with a flash, so
plan on shooting in open light.
With a maximum resolution of
only 504x378, the
PhotoRun’s images
barely make
muster for

web usage. The
2MB Compact
Flash holds
some six images
at that resolu-
tion and 15 at
the “standard”
res of 320x240.
And with a
“focus-free” lens
the diameter of
a pinhole
camera, image
quality is understandably spotty.

To save precious space, image transfer
is via an included Compact Flash card
drive that runs inline with the parallel
port and is powered by the keyboard
cable. You simply pop the memory
out of the camera and slide it into
the slot on the mini-drive. Or you
can pop it into a PC card adapter.

The PhotoRun’s images are dark (but have more
highlight detail). Unfortunately,
shadows are mottled and streaky.

If the PhotoRun were only a smidge
thinner, it might fit in your wallet

Either way, downloads are a snap.

The PhotoRun comes with Adobe’s
PhotoDeluxe, which comes up short espe-
cially when compared to the LivePix SE
that comes with Toshiba's PDR-2 camera.

The camera and card drive come with
faux-leather pouches. The drive's holds all
the cables you'll need and the camera's
attaches to your belt.

Then Umax goes the extra yard and
includes a heavy-duty Aquapac baggie for
underwater shooting.

And all this under $300. Sweet.

If you’re willing to do all your shooting
in direct sunlight and you're not looking
for pro-caliber quality, the
PhotoRun might just be
the most powerful digital
camera ever made.

Price $249
Company Umax
Phone 800.562.0311
URL www.umax.com

APR 98

boot 85

Compaq Armada 7700

The good, the bad, and the ivory

! Ill

The Armada 7700 comes armed, but it
doesn’t come fully loaded.

Of course, what with its Tillamook
233MHz processor, 32MB of EDO DRAM,
20x CD-ROM drive, and 56.6Kbps integrat-
ed modem, you might think otherwise.
Factor in the built-in AC adapter, wave-
table sound, and programmable hot-keys,
and you have the makings of one kick-
ass machine. But the Armada is robbed of
this enviable distinction by its inconsistent
performance.

Thanks mainly to the Pentium 233MHz
nestled inside, CPU performance, as
expected, was damn good. But couple the
processor with a slow-as-molasses hard
drive and the scale tips alarmingly in the
opposite direction. Heck, the 3.0GB hard
drive’s abysmal transfer rate of less than
2MB/sec was the slowest we’ve seen in
the past year. But since the entire Armada
line features removable SMART-compatible
hard drives, you can easily upgrade to a
faster one (and one toting a larger capaci-
ty too). And although you can max out
the RAM at 144MB, 16MB of it is onboard,
meaning you’ll have to waste a good
16MB (occupying one of the two slots) to
get beyond the 96MB barrier.

In the video subsystem, regular players
NeoMagic, Chips and Technologies, and
Cirrus Logic have been benched in favor
of S3’s first mobile solution, the
Aurora64V+. But unlike S3’s even newer
ViRGEMXi chipset, the Aurora64V+ isn’t a
true D3D accelerator, thus you’ll have
to rely on DirectDraw only. Another
anomaly— there’s no DOS VESA
support. We had to install
SciTech’s Display Doctor to bump
up to a higher resolution in
Quake . And even then, the
Armada proffered a paltry 11.7fps.

Ick. On the flip side, ActiveMovie
playback was terrific, with only
negligible jitter. (At least it was
with the display set at 800x600/

16-bit. With a 32-bit color depth,
the resulting playback looked sus-
piciously like it was being dithered
down to 8-bit. Weird.) If you plan
on displaying the desktop across the
LCD and external CRT simultaneously,
you can assign different refresh rates for
both displays. While the Aurora64V+ is
spec’d to support TV-out, sadly a port is
not included.

Audio offerings include hardware
wavetable sound and stereo speakers

positioned on both sides of the
LCD— a shrewd engineering move
for sure. Plus, they sound sweet
too. Oversized volume controls are
located on the front (just above the
keyboard), with audio ports out of
the way in the back. The keyboard
offers excellent tactile response,
and the oversized, raised, and
angled mouse buttons make navi-
gation a breeze. Good thing too—
there’s no Windows key (although
there is room for one— hmmm). The
information pop-ups, including bat-
tery status and power management
controls, all work in DOS.

As previously mentioned, the Armada
includes two other treats: a built-in
33.6Kbps modem (yes, it’s upgradable) and
an integrated AC adapter. Because of this,
the Armada’s weight balloons up to almost
9 pounds if you elect to carry everything
Compaq provides, including such little
goodies as space savers and component
carrying cases. Regardless, kudos to the
engineers who managed to pack all these
cool components into the case.

The Armada may have a few perform-
ance blemishes, but with a terrific feature
set, expanded functionality, and a price of
only $3,999, it’s definitely worth serious
consideration.

—Bryan Del Rizzo

SPACE SAVER

Don’t want to lug eight pounds? Drop the
space saver into the drive bay and lose
some weight immediately.

|

♦ 1

♦2

♦ 3

♦ 4

CZD

CZD

CZD

CZD

n

F

FT

*

THE BRAINS

^^OGRAiyiMING' 101

^Programmable hot l^dys on ;

Intel Tillamook Pentium 233MHz
with MMX

02 : OE : □□ ? K '

, book? Gotta love

L2 Cache

51 2K write-back

RAM

32MB (144MB maximum)

Video

S3 Aurora64V+ (2MB EDO DRAM)

THE BRAWN

Hard Drive

Various 3.0GB

CD-ROM

Compaq 20x

Expansion Bus

Two Type II, one Type III, CardBus- and
Zoomed-Video-compatible

monitor, port replicator, built-in AC, microphone,
headphone, line-out

Lap Weight

8 pounds, 2 ounces

Carrying Weight

8 pounds, 7 ounces

THE BEAUTY

Display

12.1 -inch active-matrix display

Sound

ESS 1878 FM/wavetable

Video

800x600, 32-bit

Speakers

Stereo speakers, 1 watt per channel

Communication

Built-in Compaq 7000 33.6Kbps Global SpeedPaq
Telephony Modem (upgradable to K56 Flex)

THE BUNDLE Compaq Intelligent Manageability I Online
Services I Symantec JustConnect I Microsoft NetMeeting I
Microsoft PC Card Manager I PointCast

CARRYING CASE CRAZY

The Armada includes a luggage
bag for the notebook, a soft carry-
ing case for the drives, and a hard
storage case. Phew!

86 boot APR 98

I fit I,

COMPAQ.

Hard Drive Partitions

The hard drive preinstalled in your computer has a capacity greater
than 2 gigabytes (GB). Because Microsoft Windows operating
systems do not recognize hard drive capacities greater than 2 GB,
Compaq has partitioned the hard drive into two logical drives, C
and D. Ail the preinstalled software is on drive C.

FLOWING IN THE WIND

The Armada features three separate
cooling aids: a fan on the left, vents
on the right, and fish-gills on the top.

Price $3,999
Company Compaq
Phone 800.345.1518
URL www.compaq.com

jjftlct

A complete breakdown of benchmark results is available
on the bootNet. Point your browser to www.bootnet.com

I

MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

After shelling out for the notebook itself,

Compaq expects you to shell out even more for
the Win95 CD. $14 doesn’t sound like much, but
can you say “gouging the consumer”?

The 12.1-inch display
may not be the biggest
in its class, but its still a
beaut, exhibiting a bright
display and virtually zero
flex.

Compaq also offers WinNT technical support (but
won’t pre-install it for you), and includes appro-
priate drivers and read. me files on the hard
drive. As such, Fat32 isn’t installed, restricting
the partition sizes to only 2GB.

The Armada comes a
packing, but fires a few
blanks in the process.

Fast processor

Slllooowwww hard drive

Video and audio subsys tems :

Win95 CD costs extra!

f!j^|ammable hpt-buttons

Just average performance
No TV-out port

Integrated AC

integrated modem

Pop-up information

Operating System

Media Type

WnOsmSSor

CD-ROM tanij)

SM.00 US. 0 > $30 DO CUKUn

S5-mch**ea«

CD-ROM {hfaomra NT WtorioMon 40
otfp

(fefcam $19 95 US or 53995

Canaan

CD-ROM $9.95 US Of $1495

Canaan

f CPU/MOTHERBOARD

bootMark

59.7

WIN95 APPS

SYSmark32

188

HARD DRIVE

Adaptec Thread Mark v2.0

composite

HARD DRIVE

Adaptec Thread Mark vl.O

MB/sec

1.93

CD-ROM

CD Tach/Pro vl.65

K/sec

2109

WIN95 VIDEO

ActiveMovie

% played

100

DOS GAMING

Quake vl.06

fps

11.7

1 DIRECTX GAMING

^ MDK PerfTest vl.4

92

1 MMX PROCESSING

DeBabelizer Pro

secs

324

CPU/DISK

Microsoft Visual C" compile

secs

238

Check out those oversized mouse buttons.

APR 98 boot 87

Reference Desk

Facts and figures at your fingertips

Reference publishers began putting their print volumes— including
encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauri— on CD-ROM a few years ago,
making research simpler and oh-so-much faster. Now publishers are
combining the best of print with the best of the web so information is
as up-to-date as possible. We look here at updates of previous
releases to check out what’s new.

—Andre Vrignaud

Francisco coastline.

and is

connected with the Pacific
Ocean by a strait called the
Golden Gate, which is
spanned by the Golden Gate

Saint Louls-San Francisco Railway Company

J=LCfirritajSfe.

■

• San Francisco”®”

• San Francisco
I <$■ San Francisco ®

| <5 San Francisco: Physical and human geography THE ECONOMY ®
S <5> San Francisco: Physical and human geography ®
ADMINISTRATION AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS

• South San Francisco @

<$) San Francisco: Physical and human geography CULTURAL LIFE @
® San Francisco: History®

(£> San Francisco: History THE GROWTH OF THE METROPOLIS ®

• San Francisco Bay®

® Earthquakes: EFFECTS OF EARTHQUAKES: Some great ®
earthquakes.: San Francisco.

® San Francisco: Physical and human geography: THE PEOPLE @

• San Francisco Gotera

• San Francisco de Macorls

• San Francisco. University of®

© San Francisco: Physical and human geography®

• San Francisco del Rincon

• San Francisco Peaks

San Francisco Bay

landlocked

boy

indenting

western

California

U.S.Hisa

drowned

river volley.

paralleling

Golden Gate
Bridge. Son
Francisco

Britannica CD 98 returns a wealth of info for most any search.

Encyclopedia Britannica 98

Encyclopedia Britannica’s CD 98 reference
has the answer to any question— and an
in-depth one at that. Going through 72,000
articles (over 44 million words) by hand
could take a while; luckily, this modern
adaptation of the 32-volume print edition
of the Encyclopedia Britannica gives you
the tools to find what you want.

You can search the contents of the disc
via natural language (e.g., “Who invented
the television?”) or craft a more detailed
search with Boolean search terms. However,
the natural-language search engine proved

powerful and generally returned relevant
entries on the first attempt.

An additional online component
connects you to the full-text version of
the encyclopedia on the web, allowing
you to search new entries that haven’t
made it to the print or CD editions yet,
along with an index of web links. In
addition, Encyclopedia Britannica has
finally left behind its old web-based look
and replaced it with a far slicker inter-
face. Although the new interface still
uses web technology, it’s completely
transparent to the average user. Also

Price $150

Company Encyclopedia
Britannica

Phone 800.747.8503
URL www.eb.com

new in this edition is the ability to create
custom reports, tables, and graphs com-
paring social, political, and economic
data of 191 countries.

You just can’t get a more
authoritative and useful ency-
clopedia anywhere else.

Grolier’s Multimedia
Encyclopedia 1 998

Grolier’s Multimedia Encyclo-
pedia 1998 is a fine reference
work with a few touches that
lift it above the competition.

The two-CD set is in many
ways a standard encyclopedia.

You can search terms, follow
links of interest, and peruse
the standard collection of
images, maps, and videos.

Images are particularly clean and readily
available. The maps are highly effective,
allowing you to drill down through multiple
layers for more detail— in some cases, all
the way down to street level.

What lifts
Grolier above
other references
is an excellent
online element
called The Online
Knowledge
Explorer. This
feature lets you
search additional
reference works,
including The
New Book of
Knowledge , the Encyclopedia Americana,
and the Grolier Internet Index, a collection
of 21,000 web links that guide you to addi
tional information. On top of that, you
have the assurance of knowing your refer-

Detailed maps of the world abound in Grolier ’s
encyclopedic offering for 1998.

ence work will never be out of date—
Grolier updates approximately 500 articles
a month, all available on the net.

We highly recommend Grolier’s Multi-
media Encyclopedia 1998. Beyond the
common features of CD-ROM reference
works, the online element pushes it over
the top. You might get more detailed
articles with Encyclopedia
Britannica’s 1998 offering . . .
but not by much.

Price $45
Company Grolier
Interactive
Phone 203.797.3530
URL gi.grolier.com

Collier’s Encyclopedia 1998

Collier’s Encyclopedia 1998 is an applica-
tion with an identity crisis. At first glance,
things look good. But for some reason, the
designers used web-based technologies.

The package comes on CD specifically so
users can access vast amounts of data on
their desktop. However, the entire work is
based within a web browser and uses
browser-based technologies to display all
media.

You first recognize this browser-specific
slant during install— you’re forced to install
Netscape Communicator (even if you already
have a copy). Then you get hammered with
the web slant every time you use the appli-

ls Collier a poor man’s multimedia encyclopedia or a
rich man’s enhanced web site? You decide.

cation— you literally browse local web pages.
Why go the web route? I’d guess Sierra is
planning to release a web-based subscription
encyclopedia on the net. Unfortunately, that
leaves you with a poor stand-alone product.

Beyond the web-based annoyances, the
product itself is average. You can search for
topics, follow hotlinks, zoom in on maps,
and so forth. In short, although it’s not a
bad product by any means, the lack of
special content and a less-than-stellar
interface keeps Collier’s from
being our pick.

Price $75
Developer Collier
New field

Publisher Sierra On-Line
Phone 800.757.7707
URL www.sierra.com

88 boot APR 98

Merriam-Webster’s

Collegiate Dictionary

Me rriam -Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
and Thesaurus has 160,000 entries,

214.000 definitions, and 35,000
etymologies; the thesaurus has

130.000 synonyms, antonyms, and
idioms, with about 5,000 of those
entries used in context.

This package is available in a
“Deluxe Audio Edition,” so you can
hear words pronounced — useful
when you just can’t remember how
to pronounce “picturesque.” (It’s
not “picture-squee”.) Perhaps
more interesting is the ability to
look up words in new ways. You
can search for terms by language

of origin, date of first use, and part of
speech. Even more useful is that you can
search through the actual text of the def-
initions, for when you can’t remember

£b E* Qpfera HjUoy fifowie Htfc
V) •Dictionary | Thc»auiu» |

Entry picturesque

Pronuncution ipflc-cba-Vesk
Function: ajjtctivt

Etymology French & Italum; French piUortsqut. from Itti*n piuortsco, fr

painter, from Latm piclor, from pwgtrw
Date 1703

resembling a picture : suggesting a painted scene b : charming or quaint in appearance
2 : evoking mental images : VIVID
synonyms see GRAPHIC

- picture sqtie-ly advtrb

- pictur esquo'itess noun

Merriam-Webster's Windows 3.1 -like interface does little for your
dictionary-perusing pleasure.

what word you’re looking for but you
know the meaning.

All-in-all, Merriam-Webster’s new foray
into the CD-ROM reference market is a
reasonable, if not brilliant, effort. Make
no mistake — if you want to look up a
word, it does the job, especially if you
want to hear it, too. However, if you’re
looking for a more robust tool that’s inte-
grated into your operating
ronment and applications,
spend $25 more for
Microsoft Bookshelf 98.

Price $25

Company Merriam - Webster
Phone 800.828.1880
URL www.m-w.com

Bookshelf 98

Microsoft Bookshelf 98 is one of the
handiest, though not the deepest, reference
compilations currently available on CD-ROM.
On a single disc, you get access to print

Bookshelf 98 lets you search through all reference
works simultaneously.

works such as a
dictionary, the-
saurus, quotation
reference, ency-
clopedia, atlas,
and almanac. You
also get a ZIP
code finder, a
chronology, a
computer/

Internet dictio-
nary, and an
Internet web

Human Rights and Social Justice, 1989

Chinese Politburo member
Hu Yaobang dies April 1 5 at
age 73, university students
gather In Beljllng's
Tiananmen Square
ostensibly to mourn Hu's
death (he was forced to
resign as General
Secretary In January 1987
by hard-liners for not
cracking down on student
unrest) but actually to
demand more democracy
and demonstrate against
lhn abuses of cornual

Multimedia video clips are well integrated into
Bookshelf's interface and are rarely gratuitous.

directory. And because it’s a Microsoft
product, you get seamless integration and
access to Bookshelf's contents from Windows
and most Microsoft Office applications.

Unfortunately, trade-offs had to be made
to fit all this content on one disc. Most
larger reference works have been trimmed.

as simple to use.

For example, a search on “San
Francisco” turned up a 420-word
Encarta article with seven hot-
links; the same search on the
Britannica CD found a 4,840-
word article with 34 hotlinks.

Still, Microsoft Bookshelf
deserves to be in your CD-ROM
drive whenever you’re at work.
Few reference works combine
quick and easy
access to informa-
tion while being

Price $50
Company Microsoft
Phone 800.426.9400
URL www.microsoft.com

The Complete

National Geographic

Your parents no longer need to store the
miles and miles of back issues of National
Geographic— and now you can search for
those favorite articles with ease!

The Complete National Geographic
is almost perfectly named. Its 30 CD-
ROMs archive 1,200 issues of National
Geographic spanning 11 decades,
starting from 1888. We’re talking
about more than 9,000 articles, or
over 188,500 printed pages, including
all the ads. Every page of every issue
was scanned and indexed, allowing
you to search the archive in a variety
of ways, including by topic, subject,
date, issue, photographer, advertiser,
and even map titles.

Once you’ve found an issue or
article of interest, you read it on-
screen by viewing the entire scanned
page. The pages are displayed in 8-,

16-, or 24-bit color, with a custom palette
built on the 256 colors that best represent
the images. You can also print articles to
either black and white or color printers.

The only weak points are rather nit-
picky. For one, when you first run the
program, you are forced to watch four

Different viewing controls allow you to zoom in on and rotate
images as you wish in National Geographic.

Quicktime video clips in succession —
almost a minute worth— including a Kodak
ad and a montage of National Geographic
logos. You can’t abort them. Thankfully,
you can skip them the next time by
clicking— over and over— to kill each video
as it comes up. The only other disappoint-
ment was that Mindscape didn’t include
the fold-out maps/posters that often came
with the issues. A pity, since some of them
were quite stunning.

The (almost) Complete National
Geographic is highly recommended to any
fan of the print publication— and not only
because you can finally get all
that shelf space back!

Price $180
Developer National
Geographic

Publisher Mindscape Inc.
Phone 800.897.9900
URL www.mindscape.com

APR 98

boot 89

But who’s buying?

With the advent of multi-meg silver discs, smut purveyors have taken both CD-
ROM and DVD-ROM formats to their sweatier extremes. But despite promises of
greater storage capacity, better picture quality, and <( total interactivity ,” the
question remains, does sex have a place on the PC?

If a 500 polygon big-breasted adventurer gets you hot and bothered, maybe
it's time to step up to the real thang.

—Andrew Sanchez

Bad Wives

Hailed as last year’s
“Best Adult Film,”

Vivid Interactive’s
Bad Wives jumps to
DVD, promising to
take full advantage
of the DVD format.

If only Vivid had
remembered to pack
picture quality and
interactivity along
for the ride.

Bad Wives' multiple camera angles
allow you to watch the feature film from
an alternate angle with which to the see
the rampant flesh friction when a little
DVD logo appears from time to time in
the lower right hand corner. Despite being
shot on film, Bad Wives' visual quality
suffers when crunched down into MPEG-2
format-artifacts galore dance inside solid
colors and pixelation runs rampant. DVD is

From here, you can click your way toward ecstacy.

capable of up
to 720 pixels
per horizontal
line vs. VHS tape’s 320
pixels for crystal-clear
pics, but Bad Wives'
underachieving graphics
seem more at home on
an MPEG-l-compressed
CD-ROM, as opposed
to the GB-holdin’ DVD.
A less-aggressive com-
pression ratio would have nipped these
problems.

And the “interactive” aspect of Bad
Wives is pretty limp, especially compared
to the real-time action found in Pixis’s
Diva X series. One segment of Bad Wives
promises hot one-on-one action with Kobe
Tai, a perky Asian adult actress. But guess
what, Skippy? Vivid’s idea of interaction
is playing “find the hotspot” on a pre-
rendered background. Your reward? A two-

Bad Wives packs multiple camera angles and more for you DVD
freaks out there— but don’t even compare its interactivity with
anything remotely real-time.

minute loop of Kobe grunting and
moaning— what bunk! The other option,
“Int. Tel. Sex.” is another lackluster “find
the hotspot and watch the clip.” Yawn-it’s
like Myst... but with sex! Pixis’s revolu-
tionary and highly interactive Touch-and-
Feel User Interface needn’t worry about
this competition. At least the disc doesn’t
come with any regional black-outs— after
all, porn is internationally spoken.

Ultimately, Bad Wives makes
a better VHS rental than a
DVD purchase.

Price $40
Company Vivid
Interactive
Phone 800.822.8339
URL www.vividdvd.com

Riana Rouge

Former Playboy Playmate Gillian
Bonner runs around half-nekkid
and gets medieval on almost
everyone she meets as a secre-
tary-turned-superheroine in the
much-ballyhooed “sensual adven-
ture” game Riana Rouge.

Let’s get thing one straight
here— Riana Rouge is a screen-
troller where you’ll spend most
of your time
looking for
unmarked hot-
spots— once
you find one,
clicking engages
some hokey,
pixelated FMV.

Riana Rouge spans
three CDs, with Bonner
and crew prancing
around in dominatrix
gear and revealing

Egads! She's been negligees and superim-

gibbed! posed on uninspired

Riana Rouge
Version: 1.0

Max Re
Win95

pre-rendered
3D backdrops
that reek of
early 80s first-
generation
point-and-click
adventures,
such as the
Journeyman
Project. While
there’s a
variety of
locales to

investigate, they get stale real quick.

Interacting with NPCs comes down to
clicking on one of the colored gems in
the lower right-hand corner, with each
gem signifying a particular emotional state.
Choices can branch off to a sudden and
unexplained bloody death, or continue

She’s mad, she’s bad, and she’s horny! She’s
Riana Rouge, and you’d best bring protection.

adventuring. While this interface
is intriguing (and may pave the
way for more realistic NPC inter-
action in future games), the
Riana Rouge reality is painfully
simplistic.

Let’s not forget the scads of soft-core
bumping-and-grinding that goes on
between Rouge and her cohorts, and
the disturbingly graphic death scenes
that look more at home in Resident Evil
than a “sensual thriller.”

No amount of T&A can overcome the
dusty graphics, hokey blue-screened FMV,
and stank-ass gameplay. Riana Rouge is
destined to join Voyeur as a bargain-bin
titillating adventure best
not taken.

Price $50

Developer Black Dragon
Productions
Publisher Eidos
Phone 800.616.2022
URL www.blackdragon.com

90 boot APR 98

Ordering boot back issues couldn’t
be any easier! The price per copy
for back issues within the U.S. is
$9.95 (including postage and han-
dling). For foreign orders, send
$12 in U.S. funds (includes airmail
postage). To order just the CD
within the U.S., send $7.95
(includes postage). For foreign
orders, send $10 in U.S. funds
(includes airmail postage). All
orders must be prepaid and sent
to the following address:

4 &

Vol. 1, No. 2
OCT 96

Make Multimedia

Vol. 1 , No. 1
aug/sept 96
Dream Machine

Vol. 1, No. 3
nov 96
DVD Preview

Vol. 2, No. 1
JAN 97

Pure Power Preview

le&vxm m —

sound

.- Solutions

Klamath

Vol. 2, No. 3
MAR 97
The In Crowd

Vol. 2, No. 7
jul 97

Third Generation
3D Cards

Vol. 2, No. 6
jun 97
Pentium II

Vol. 2, No. 8
AUG 97

Pentium Killers

Site, ?

PC Inferno!

Vol. 2, No. 9
sep 97

Dream Machine ’97

Vol. 2, No. 10
oct 97

Direct X Files

Vol. 2, No. 9
nov 97
Accelerated
Graphics Port

Vol. 2, No. 10
dec 97

1997 Editor’s
Lust List

Vol. 3, No. 1
JAN 98

1998 Pure Power
Preview

Vol. 3, No. 2
FEB 98

Digital Camera
ShootOut

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Product Information Number 106

WITH JON PHILLIPS

K3fl H A lfis8

Microsoft Under
Bloody Seige

ATF AGENTS STORM REDMOND
COMPOUND; MS RESPONDS WITH
LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY

REDMOND, WA — Government agents stormed
the Microsoft campus early yesterday morning,
igniting a spectacular firefight that claimed 113
lives and is threatening political stability in the
northwest United States. The siege followed a
ten-day standoff during which Microsoft employ-
ees bunkered down with automatic weapons in
defiance of a court-ordered antitrust decision.

On March 14, the Supreme Court ordered
Microsoft to divide itself in half, and then divide
each of those halves in half, and each of those
halves in half, and so on and so on, until each inde-
pendent subsidiary consisted of a project manager,
a marketing flack, and a coffee machine.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates responded by
telling the Court “I want you to go to hell today,”
and then proceeded to stock armaments.

Yesterday’s shootout began at 6:21 a.m. and
abruptly ended at 5:30 p.m. when MSNBC

switched coverage to Al Roker’s review of Blues
Brothers 2000.

At 5:29 p.m., Gates flew over the carnage in
an experimental helicopter made of impene-
trable alloys and announced the following
from a bullhorn:

“Attention anti-capitalist, communist pigs.
Do not attempt to shoot me from the sky. I am
flying over the carnage in an experimental heli-
copter made of impenetrable alloys. Lay down
your weapons before it’s too late. I repeat: Lay
down your weapons. And buy Microsoft. We’re
at $15 5 a share and climbing!”

As nightfall hit, Gates changed out of his
battle fatigues, ingested a handful of southeast
Asian hallucinogens, and entered a state of ele-
vated religious awareness. Wearing nothing but
a sari and surrounded by captured ATF agents
imprisoned in makeshift bamboo cages, the
commander-god held court, slowly ruminating
on topics of the day.

“The destruction of Netscape was a funny
‘concept.’ People ‘got’ it,” Gates said, gesturing
with his fingers as if to punctuate his words with

The Commander’s broadcast visage.

quotation marks. “The American people saw the
intrinsic humor in the carpet bombing of an ill-
conceived and failing technology company.

“And the French — they too shall fall.”
Government sources believe Microsoft has
enough employees, supplies, and ammunition to
delay release of its assets until Q3. The govern-
ment also believes Microsoft has won the sup-
port of rural Washington state militiamen, who
are willing to pounce like frisky kittens on any
anti-government insurrection that so much as
ruffles a few pieces of underbrush.

President Clinton has issued a statement say-
ing the U.S. would be willing to give up
Washington state and parts of Oregon if
Microsoft would remove an unwanted manila
folder that is sitting on his Oval Office desktop.

Fighting is expected to resume today, followed
by MSNBC coverage of Al Roker making an
impassioned plea for a sequel to Cool Running 5.

4U flf*
4

Redmond Ridge: The First Three Hours

The once-bucolic Microsoft Campus is now a blood-stained killing field. Here’s how the carnage unfolded.

Internet
Explorer
Developers’
Conference
begins; Active
Desktop
declared “still
a great idea.”

ATF surprises MS infantry
cluster engaged in team-
building scream therapy
exercise; 64 ATF agents
killed or wounded; MS
attrition unknown.

MS FORGES
Bill

Product

Managers

ATF challenges MS to a
“friendly” game of tug-o-
war; MS doesn’t bite; the
killing continues apace.

MS engineers jam
ATF radio communi-
cations; 49 ATF
agents leave
bunkers thinking
siege is over; all die.

•8=

f I

Evangelists

Engineers

I

eg

Marketing

Directors

1

is

Marketing

Flacks

ATF agent shooting beer bottles for fun
mistakenly wings low-level MS employee
running from parking lot to
Visitor’s Center; the siege begins.

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ATF

Squads

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EDITORS’

Product Information Number 187

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50 billion operations per second. 3 million triangles per second. Up to 1 2MB of ultra-fast, single-cycle DRAM.
Two independent, on-board texture processors for single-pass trilinear filtering. Full triangle set-up processing.
LOD MIP-mapping. Texture compositing, morphing and other complex effects. High-precision Z-buffering.
True perspective correction with sub-pixel and sub-texel accuracy. As much as 3 times the performance of

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©1998 Creative Technology Ltd. All other brand or product names listed are trademarks or registered trademarks and are property of their respective holders.